Nuevos Vecinos seeks to set up a dialogue between the last two projects by Adrián Gaitán: Para los tiempos de Corren, presented in the XI version of the Luis Caballero award in 2022 and Nobleza Obliga, carried out in NC arte in 2021.
Nobleza Obliga
Thirty-five nobility titles were sold to pay for the wedding of Charles II of Spain. But neither the agreed values nor the buyers´ genealogies can be found in the minutes, that hide more than they reveal. However, we know through some letters sent a decade later (1962), that many of those titles cost less than thirty thousand ducats. Those letters warned each of those clients, that if they didn’t pay the difference, those titles would become perpetual, instead of lifelong. In other words, their relatives wouldn’t be able to inherit them.
Even if the offer of nobility titles took place in America, what was more common was the sale of public offices. Just by looking through the archives in Quito, you can find that from 1591, the positions of councilor, court clerk, and standard-bearer were cheaply sold. Even the viceroy was pressured to open new positions to help fund the Navy of the South Sea.
Nobleza Obliga, by Adrián Gaitán is a great living room inside a room. It is kind of an isolated area, where the drawing follows the outline of a typical sand bunker from a golf course. The room’s limits are constituted by something that seems to be an elegant wallpaper. However, just by getting closer you will notice that it is only canvas from a cheap sack. The inside floor has a rococo design made by picks and compacted soil, and there is a classic crystal lamp that is assembled with used teabags, whose color and smell give a melancholic atmosphere to the whole scene.
A green border is what joins the canvas with the floor. It is made by plants from an interior garden organized in a Versailles manner. Again, when getting near you see they are weeds, that are so common it was difficult to find their name. These actually lack a title: primrose, roof weed, brushwood that are always battled, destroyed, exterminated, but never defeated.
You can state that everything in Nobleza obliga is real: the soil, the canvas, the picks, the tea, but at the same time, everything is fake: the carpet, the walls, the tiles, the crystal. Adrián Gaitán has built a great lie with truths, but can you say that social relationships are made of something else?
The truth is bitter; lies are beautiful. In the exhibition it is evident that only what is fake needs authenticity titles, signatures, or seals: degrees, honors, art, and money. Gaitán has explored this topic time and again through a work that is surprising in the sense of matter and also, conceptually deep. However, this division seems unfair because in his work it is matter the one that is responsible for elaborating concepts.
Curatorial text: Julia Buenaventura.
Santos
The iconography of a saint from the beginnings of Christianism had an unexpected boom a thousand years after his death. Saint Sebastian was member of the Emperor’s Praetorian Guard in ancient Rome (3rd century A.D.) The profusion of his images is due to something that is vaguely insinuated and barely known: his supposed miracle of being the shield to defeat death or elude contagion amidst the irruption and gradual disappearance of a plague that decimated the population of the old continents between the 14th and 16th centuries.
Thus, this widely known allegory of classical roots is inscribed in analogies that arise from the way in which he was tortured, that is how the images usually represent him: the agony of the arrows that were shot at him for not retracting from his faith (la sagittazione), that are thought as signs or messengers of a disease that, even if they entered his body, were not able to finish his life. He was murdered after recovering from his injuries, by being flogged and beaten. It is a devotional appearance of Depulsar Pestilitatis (“Protector against the plague”) that increases with the exaltation of his young body, resisting the arrows between agony and ecstasy and that makes him an emblem of strength by excellence in face of a scourge whose biological agent was not known at the time.
Adrián Gaitán reproduces several of these representations in a chiaroscuro (without arrows) on wood, using as pigment the viscous stains of gasoline or diesel that leak from cars and that are found on the floor of parking lots. With reverberations from the pandemic, the installation concentrates on another fever, one that we haven’t recovered from: the one of the “black gold” that moves the industrial society and has caused wars in the last century. Amid a transition where those fossil fuels begin to be substituted by renewable energies with zero emissions, several of the largest hydrocarbon companies have devised in the last years a grant and patronage policy to different museums all over the world. These act as a source (or shelter) for cleaning the corporate image that the artist alludes to in a sort of luminous threshold or a cinematographic scenery that, immersed in many forms of collapse, can belong to the end of times or to the beginning.
His proposal transforms the room into a sanctuary and, simultaneously, into a post office to coordinate shipments of these shady copies. From this place they are sent to different cities in the world where the originals are found. Thus, they explore the possibility of being anointed or not by the art system (“holy oils” to consecrate the admitted ones or anoint the sick?), claiming their brief substitution within those same enclosures of value or support; in a moment in which all the values, the same as our notions of resources and power, claim to be substituted. As if it were the chronicle of a landslide, the installation suggests that, with or without return, there are energies (iconic, historic, and cultural) whose polluting and dark splendor we still see fascinated. A decadent opulence that, with or without faith, we accept as an invitation to a moderate torture: that which can postpone the inevitable and well-deserved act of dying, as if by carelessness, an additional life has arrived as retribution.
Curatorial text: Emilio Tarazona.
