“Why did Butes perish by drowning? Because we do not come from the dry.”
Pascal Quignard, Butes.
Neither utopia nor dystopia. In contrast, a radical mise en abyme of the disfigured, eviscerated and imbued in its own metamorphic viscosity. No gimmick. The flow is here a stochastic abyssing; a successive right now of unpredictable trajectory / cadence / duration. It drips, evaporates, coagulates in virtuality.
This solo exhibition by Edgar Cobián (Guadalajara, Jalisco, 1978) is an installation that nurtures and complexifies the heterogeneous and interdisciplinary character of his artistic activity. The line, the stroke, the silhouettes, the chromatic contrasts captured in the large canvases suspended from a sinuous spatial drawing generate ambivalent critical approaches to the contemporary representation of the normalized and commodified body, but not for that reason asexual, neutral or asocial. Freed from any support (stretcher, frame or other type of solid matter) these canvases become light, flexible, vulnerable elements. They hang like political or advertising banners and their inherent promise of vigorous futures… expired.
At a compositional level, the weightless, intertwined and superimposed figures, the globular and organic forms, the languid limbs and the intermittent presence of minimal or strange landscape and architectural reminiscences give rise to a rich mixture of stylistic resonances in the history of drawing and painting. Randomly, Cobián refers to evanescent mannerist representations of Antonio da Correggio, to a certain surrealism of Max Ernst or to the recent experimentations of Alum Williams around the dramatic potential of the animated, half-melted stain.
None of the above would make sense without the presence of other media used by Cobián as a central part of his show. On the one hand, sound, music, dance, as the genesis of his practice is manifested here with the intermittent activation of an electroacoustic composition punctuated by body movements and, on the other hand, the presence of poetic texts that ironize and amplify the plentiful meanderings of his psyche. The projected grid -also traced in some drawings- emphasizes the tension of the indomitable organic torrent with the omnipresent logic, structure and rigidity of the socio-political control apparatus. Thus, this mise-en-scène puts in tension Vladimir Nabokov’s maxim: “The pattern of the thing precedes the thing”. Cobián chooses to jump and dive, to embody Butes’ liquid rebelliousness. Letting go of the oars, crossing the Rubicon.
Víctor Palacios
Curator