'NIGHT OF JOY' by Ander Sagastiberri at Raccoon projects, Salvador

PART I 

You may know me from exhibitions like Metofam, Petal, Blinky’s Summer

and the Legitimate Curve or Bi Dos Two but…

I haven’t touched the keyboard for a few days, looking at the internet like cows on the train. Yesterday, an opening, a return to reality, and yet a sweet return, an encounter with strange, floating, transparent, processual works, and an artist sure of her work, in her place, serene and humorous. It has a good brightness to counter the enveloping darkness. —How did you do it?— I was surprised, and I said: congratulations! One crawls from event to event, but this one stood out from the ordinary. The style postulates, on the other hand, were clear and in sync with the times in which sculpture lives. Rather symptomatic, side effect style, vaguely attacking the idea of the statue with the prevalence of the material gesture. She was talking about recoding stimuli, creating feedback... I prefer what is direct, what does not come by rebound and jargon escapes... If not, we easily fall into antagonism, without seeing that this is completely permeable, mutable; deceptive in its appearances but true in its mutability. This holds her up like a surfer on a wave... A lie! Blind to the rest of the world, well-lived, indulgent and superhuman. 

Suddenly I am invaded by this feeling of becoming one, abandoning old tantrums, leaving a place open to the practical, where fantasy barely intervenes, and another, where everything is possible. Going in and out of oneself, seeing oneself from the outside, clinging to the processes. It seems that there are notions of beauty to follow, to distinguish what is wanted from what is not. Looking in the mirror —that place where all problems arise—, I realize the things that don’t correspond, the ugliness: I see a triangle between the ear, the huge pimple above the eyebrow and a lock of greasy hair curved over the forehead.

While I am concentrating on this dilemma, there is a moment of disbelief, of union of all these fragments; and it occurs to me that the beauty would be the harmony between them. But as soon as it comes, it leaves. 

That art is a struggle is fine. We learn, we face our fears, ways to address problems that seemed unapproachable or to be avoided. But there is no need for a great pretext either, if you navigate well with a breath of air you can manage and perhaps a gale is no longer such a big deal. It is not for nothing, but you have to concentrate your efforts while being open to change... - Whatt? that you can’t make a fuss?— A LIE LIKE A UNICORN! All the racket is fine as long as it’s done in confidence, with confidence. Coercion of course serves as a tool: it is to prohibit something to see what happens in us. We can’t have everything we want, but on the other hand, there is nothing more pathetic than living deprived of all pleasure. It’s not just about finding pleasure, that too, but about going

beyond it. It is not what turns us on, but what moves us.

Juana-Dolores-Juana-Dolores-¡Juana-Doloooreeeeeeeeees! That Saturday afternoon at the Campos Theater in Bilbao is still vivid in my memory. He had never seen anything like it... but the sensation that Tolstoy said characterized good art was incited. «...it is as if we had already thought about it without having managed to express it; as if it had been on the tip of the tongue.” 

Lying on the linoleum-covered stage-floor, no doubt prepared for some chain of unusual movements, she came to life before our eyes. From the back row mine only managed to decipher two beautiful legs at rest, and a bright red mini-skirt. In the background there was a photograph of a working-class architectural façade confronting us as a reminder or perhaps as a simple decorative backdrop, revealing something of the agit-prop, make-shift and quite in-your-face spirit of actions charged with poetry. in the following ninety minutes without mincing words.

They were intense months and whether in dance, theater or plastic art it was obvious that something was happening again as if it were for the first time. I felt lucky to live that period that had not yet begun. Since then everything seems more intense to me. Lately it’s like something is coming to life before our eyes. In a month those works (#Juana Dolores and Ander’s exhibition with a title that is too long and strange to pronounce) made me feel the push of everything that takes us to the edge at some point; towards the limits of perception. There were two samples that combined lucidity, strong sensations and humor. Two works that opened my eyes to the right extent. If there were a decisive factor for our generation, apart from the precarious and somewhat regressive context, it would be the undertaking of singular tasks within a global and dizzying panorama; something that I think was reflected in that exhibition (Ander Sagastiberri — I do have seen some objeto volador no identificado do you?). The tenacity and sensitivity of each one comes into play with a renewed weight. Being thirty-somethings, we have been so dizzy by all kinds of advances in so many directions that it is very difficult to find a starting point for creation, not to mention a specific medium with which to work or see oneself reflected. It seems that things are turning and that there is something —even if it is only that feeling of estrangement, so valuable in art, on the other hand— to hold on to.

PART II 

A morbid imprint, as if kissed on linen, and leafy gardens there, behind an elbow, or Humpty Dumpty’s bald head—party animal wherever there are. In an iconic fairy with soapy skin who looks at us with desire while covering her right side with a wing, furrowing fuchsia pink meanders through her shapeless little body... bursting her buttocks like stars in the galaxy —he-he-he. In gardens painted centuries ago in small formats like true photographs, with endless whirlwinds and eddies. An olive green and daisy frieze with a robin dozing in the sunset, wrapped in the caresses of a leafy willow and the fanned out rear of a peacock. In placid dreams (those of the robin), abstracted by THC; oblique stripes on which giant amoebas make love and a violently snoring nymph—I say violet!—on a worn tapestry, invested with the royalty of time.

In that beard from the hand of Betes, back in 1545, where little hairs of oil continue to grow. Or the revelry of Singer Sargent and the primal cannibals of Aubrey Williams, gobbled up while one looks for help, for example in a simple museum door seen in foreshortening, even though it resonates with the Grande Femme of 1960. On a vinyl that rotates to the rhythm of the 80, and a dance floor where a blue angel descends, leaping like a flying fish from the river of Blake’s life, to cry out to hell, wide open and adorned with a flower-filled jar where a praying mantis lurks, dressed of cabaret and who toasts with a botanical Frankenstein spiced with saffron. 

In thousands and thousands of little bells that surround a voracious squid disguised as Victor Pasmore, crossing the bridges of the Bronx in a devilish and crashed night train. 

Or in a vase from La Tour. 

Also a mendacious lemon that interrogates from the sea a cross in the sky, whose points spin and launch crimson trails carried by the wind, deformed into alphanumeric values on gas-oil polychrome clouds, collapsed in acid-jazz curtains by the friezes. of a temple where —momentarily— a couple in love is formed. 

A couple in love made of snowflakes and on the grass, behind there a little ET surrounded by tulips militarily arranged after another alien matrimonial scene and a farmer stuck head and legs sitting on a Rietveld, where he waits smiling and chewing five bananas for at the same time, and who faces two bodies bursting from dancing; Exploded into abject and evaporated viscera towards another rarefied world, where...

The same thing walks a giant with a beard

Pregnant with a winking little whale

Let a Daddy-Long-Legs say hello to the neighborhood

And to a flower which paw-of-kangaroo

He sees a lipstick-red ladybug.

A naked man with a long, crouching torso, but obstinate in wearing heels, pulling back his prominent gonads and thrusting out another huge member in search of Tasmania or who knows what.

Even in doing contortions, only for that first hour post-coital urination, numb by a lady’s coat.

Or that day when a little fox turned into a cutting carried by the wind, when it escaped, laughing out loud, its stealthy paws turning to ductile red fibers. When the influence of the elements on the species became clear, and we could be happy.

When I met him, and I gave him the nickname of... Dandelion.