"Chance leaves the world naked of all the probabilities
in which reason places it.” Georges Bataille
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Luis' work is a commitment to the art of process, he is interested in communicating to the viewer the successive march of the intellect-sensibility that takes place at the moment of creation, when he is imprinting an affection on the material. His bet is that the visitor enters his work, his stay with him, through a material or an artistic discipline.
Every time Luis faces a series or a space and time, he stops and takes consistency the chaos he has caused to give way to the natural order of chance and its beauty called with great care, paying attention to each of the elements with which he is going to provoke and activate an aesthetic situation.
As a starting point, let's take the axes that lead his research: painting, chance and ideas, from Duchamp to SolLeWitt, with the imprints of Yoko Ono, Ellsworth Kelly, Gabriel Orozco, Daniel Guzman, among others. His work does not stop/define itself at a certain moment by some trend, school or market. From a critical and free stance, he finds a channel of experimentation-not fixation, as he seeks serendipity and controlled accidents.
I met Luis in 2000 in Mexico City. Our mutual friend, Martha León, introduced us, under the pretext of collaboration for the exhibition Abstract: in the presence of the here and now, a collective of artists who were promoting their work through the portal arrte.com
Luis had been studying a master's degree in Spain for some years and was in town for a short stay to greet his family. When I went to visit him to see his recent work and include it in the exhibition in question, he showed me some images of what he was producing in Europe, pieces in different media, various "thematic" series linked to change and transformation and of various philosophical interests; he explained that he could not count on those works for the exhibition, as he did not have them at hand. Given the situation, in which time was pressing, I asked him about his previous work. Meditating, he took me to the basement of the house, where the family's disused works were located, where there were some dusty frames, as well as broken canvases. The scene was discouraging. When he turned the objects over, worse still, some early "abstract paintings"; I sarcastically commented something like "thank goodness, at least they still have color". We looked at each other and both saw the connection of our intention. Luis started taking one out and I started turning the other around. In a while we had some sticks with cloth in front of us, a whole universe, the central theme of the exhibition.
We smiled as we said goodbye and agreed that the next day we would meet in the gallery to mount an installation with all those "things". And so we did, for three days we closed ourselves up to meditate, chat, observe, move the objects, hang them, place them on the floor, transform them, I can well summarize now: to reflect on the condition of the painting. A very unusual installation in the contemporary art environment of Mexico City, a sort of conceptual arte povera, very far from the proposals of the names in vogue, in that summer of 2000, such as Francis Alys, Franco Aceves Humana, among others. The installation was accompanied by a text-manifesto, which is included in this print.
The 16 works in installation, video, object and process, which speak about the saturation of information, about the prolific absence of content in the current art circuit, appropriation, the physical act of painting and its condition in doing so, matter in painting and its construction, as well as the relationship of painting in the museum and in public space, which make up the collection Horizontal Painting are a miscellany of thoughts, references and statements of what in 2010, Luis thinks-does.
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Luis began in the visual arts in the 1980s attending classes in San Carlos. As he is from that time and school, he started with painting and abstract expression; as well as, in his condition of Zacatecas, what was pertinent in his immediate tradition, came to him through that same branch. After finishing his studies as an engineer, he decided to do a master's degree, he wanted to specialize in painting, so he enrolled in the Massana School in Barcelona, in the studies of Arts Applied to Wall, that is, painting in all its possibilities, both technical and conceptual.
It is under the tutorship of Iganacio Balli that he recognizes the physical and conceptual possibilities of the discipline.
It is since the year 2000 that we can accurately detect the dawn of his interests and the constants in process, fully enunciated in Horizontal Painting. As in the piece Loop - homage to Yoko Ono - which is anchored in the artist's instructions paintings and in the tradition-discipline for the formation of an oriental monk, in which a stone is wrapped with rice paper, then inked and finally unwrapped, without breaking the paper and obtaining its imprint. This principle is the one that followed for the realization of Untitled -stone print series- a piece made ten years ago. In both pieces the sense of being obeys to the same principle: to wrap and to mark a stone and with it to make painting, but the enunciation is totally different, in the first piece the hand is detached as principle of invoice, to ponder the contemplation and the finding of the idea as axis of the beauty, whereas in the second this one is revealed by the attention in the hand and its connection between the reason-spirit-soul-action. In a linear direction we could even read in these pieces a contradiction between them, but if we appeal to the random thought we will notice the interest in the artifact outside the brush and the cycle, as devices of the pictorial; in the first one it is the medical drip and the second one the passage of time.
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His continuous learning and encounters with masters, realities and ideas about and in contemporary art, during his stay in Europe, led Luis to reveal different materializations, in objects, videos, photographs and assemblages. Piece by piece he developed a body of work, which given the space of speculative silence that occurred in the residence in Oaxaca in 2009, allowed us to set up continuities and maximize the flow of interests in works that have been expressed in a punctual totality in Horizontal Painting.
In the piece Naranja (2000), early work and germ of the Series of Compacts, the principle of reduction and agglutination is outlined. In a small "book" (because of the succession of leaves and the format) that transforms the fruit into a visual idea, in which its volume is flattened and its plasticity is maximized. Each sheet of the object is a macro approach to the fruit's fleshiness, an abstract provocation of color, lines and curved shapes.
With these values as a principle of experimentation is that in the work Novel (2002) he takes a book and strips it, then crumples each leaf and decomposes it from its primordial sense, to be read, to agglutinate and crush it into its first book square volume. The result is a very visually appealing "brick", in which each sheet became a sort of pixel that builds an object of graphic-pictorial qualities. Its lightness to weight should also be highlighted.
Luis continues to develop the ideas provoked by this piece in Guía Urbana and Páginas Amarillas, both from 2002. Each one shows different conceptual aspects, the first one regarding the idea of map/plane/volume and the second one regarding the process and sense of consumer goods; but in both the pictorial value as a three-dimensional object is growing. Thus, in Pintura (2002) the transgression to the academic idea of painting occurs in a complete way, it is a cylinder made with the artist's paintings compacted. Matter and form are a unit, a gramma.
With this path worked on in the pieces Untitled -from the compressed series-
(Art Forum), Untitled -from the compressed series- (wrestling promotion posters) and Untitled -from the compressed series- (folk dance posters), the pictorial resemantization it obtains is very attractive and exponential. The two-dimensional plastic character of the painting is transformed by the three-dimensional material quality, achieving that the unique and natural purpose of the painting, the color, is generated by its materiality, beyond the domain imposed by the representation. Besides this, in the tablet made with sheets of the Art Forum magazine the reflective accent on the condition of painting in contemporary art, is right to name without rhetoric typical of the tautologies so used in the current circuit.
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Ya en 1944 Georges Bataille disertaba sobre la brutalidad del azar, en su escrito Le Coupable ( Paris, Edición Gallimard, 1944) pronuncia las facultades de tal condición, su carácter como energía que deja desnuda a la humanidad ante las probabilidades en que la razón la coloca; por ello lo instala como el ultimo reducto de lo definitivo, asunto altamente inquietante, pues le proporciona su naturaleza de divino, claramente, obsceno y desagradable. Arrojando al humano, turbiamente a su "buena o mala" suerte. Más imposible, ya que Dios es un ordenador de la realidad, incuestionable, en que todo parece previamente arreglado, la posibilidad ante la necesidad de ser, reduce el devenir humano a la posibilidad fuera del pensamiento sistemático. Desde el curso de las cosas el mundo pende del azar, y nos puede causar depresión, porque adjudica mayor poder al Rey, mas la omnipotencia de la rezón limita el poder de la suerte. Pareciera que esta limitación bastara porque todo el mundo obedece a leyes y como somos racionales, nos sentimos cómodos con ello, pero el verdadero curso de las cosas se nos escapa a las extremos, ya que es ahí en donde hay libertad. En los extremos el pensamiento deja de ser y existe el azar.
WITHOUT FEAR OF BEING WRONG, 10 YEARS IN THE MATERIALIZATIONS OF LUIS CARRERA-MAUL
olgaMargarita dávila
2010