“The most fatal thing a man can do
is try to stand alone.”
― Carson McCullers:
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

The atomic rooster has sung and warned us about the catastrophe to come, its song is a beautiful and painful rumble; similar to a swan’s last song when saying goodbye forever, when we foretell an imminent end. Inspired by the apodictic tragedies, the essence of the Gothic (in the full extent of the word), and the rites of abjuration, Funkadelics’ Parliament (or the de[re]valued insignias) is the most recent exhibition by Guillermo Santamarina, where he reflects on fond and miserable characters, the search for an unattainable redemption and the eternal and fateful feast of misfits and freaks.

The artist has created a chaotic and dissolute staging, in which he freely mixes different references to literature, art and rock. The result of this tangle is a feeling of collective catharsis. Similar to a mass of a strange cult or similar to the concerts of Parliament or Funkadelic, in the seventies of the last century, where hundreds of souls congregated to indulge in the orgy of funk. And with the promise of a prospective redemption, in a singular space where the rejected met and recognized each other, dragged by catharsis, weed smoke and an obtuse cardboard spaceship.

Santamarina scrutinizes the affliction of existence for those deemed different and others before the oppression of reality. Ironically he rescues the most inhospitable moments of these characters and transforms them into acts of benevolence, a clear example is the character of J. Singer of the novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carston McCullers, who from his marginalized deaf-mute condition strives in attending to human solidarity and faith, even for an absolutely miserable period, by the hand of individuals in insurmountable conditions, and in the end, sadly resolute in his tragedy. For Santamarina, that dramatic node becomes an event that opens the possibility to a divergent understanding of this world today; about our discontinuous capacities of fraternity, and about the fortuitous devotion of the neighbor for his equal.

The hopeful union as a promising force of restoration and continuity is a fundamental part in this exhibition, not only from the certification of a model that informs the assists, the collaborations and the coauthorships of the exhibited works, but also in its subtext. The works speak of friendship and complicity as instrumental acts, of irremediable expansion of melancholy, of presumed salvation, of subversion and sublime emancipation. And also of catastrophe as a liberating possibility; and of the collective strength and conscience acting in the face of adversity, in these nefarious times, in these collapsed environments. Guillermo wants this exhibition to serve as a showcase to talk about the creative possibilities of the rebellion of the marginalized, of those outsiders, every day we are more and more. Of their fragility and their impermanence, which are also ours.

Laos Salazar, 2017

For his second solo show at GAGA, Guillermo Santamarina aims to embrace new ghosts from his habitual coupling with aesthetic structures that parade his surroundings both in his wake and sleep periods, tip-toeing on his personal obsessions and praising others – stubborn circumstances – that pullulate at the sensible contemporary disposals, like those of millions of individuals in urban reality.

The exhibition is created as an exercise of concurrency that digs into artistic plasticity and, in doing so, seeks to redeem and recode modern discursive cultural models, which assimilate imposed quota to the creative processes (such as a lover’s illusion or disenchantment) that result in visual diarrhea. Santamarina’s practice proposes to be constituted with some extent of coherence yet hardly allowing logical lines to be drawn from its serious abstract obstinacy, revealing and questioning perspectives of pulsating desires (perhaps unsatisfied), and holding itself as dramatic intentions of disguising addictions, wills and passions.

A group of encounters , fractions, coexistences, antinomies and absurdities that constitute a cosmos as an analytic situation, the resulting works of Santamarina’s exercise offer possible detachments and adoption of values; or games of double and triple nature with the assimilation of rules and statutes, similar to those found in models which oriented the undertakings of Bertolt Brecht, P.D. Ouspenski, Hima af Klint, A.S. Neill, Michel Foucault, Tadeusz Kantor, and Sun Ra, all paid homage to in this exhibition.

“En este mundo no hay nada cierto, salvo la muerte y los impuestos.”
Benjamín Franklin

“¡Muerte, impuestos y partos! Nunca hay un momento conveniente para ninguno de ellos.”
Margaret Mitchell, Lo que el viento se llevó, 1936.

Primero la noción de persona, del latín personare, que quiere decir resonar. Era la mascara usada por los actores, luego se convirtió en el papel o el actor mismo, para luego derivar en un individuo de la raza humana. Aquel que en la vida real representa una función y que existe hasta el momento de su muerte.

Luego persona moral, del latín persona ficta como forma jurídica y mores, costumbre. O persona jurídica, una entidad no natural o física vista por la ley con el estatus de persona; un sujeto aparente que oculta a los verdaderos. Existe como consecuencia del acto jurídico de constitución y puede tener una vida que exceda la de aquellas personas que la constituyen.

Entonces la pregunta es, ¿cómo y qué declarar ya sea como persona física o como persona moral, en la dinámica de la exposición colectiva de verano? Performances pasados, retratos, cuerpos y proyectos de largo plazo, personajes ficticios y Empresas… Para aquellos que declaran y aquellos que deciden no hacerlo. Para aquellas personas morales y las que son inmorales, e incluso aquellas que no existen.

Fernando Mesta
Junio 2010 , México D.F.

After 30 years of professional experience developed in more than three hundred exhibitions, Mexican curator Guillermo Santamarina presents his second solo show, reappearing to the world as an (emerging?) artist at Gaga.

The exhibition –chaotically- organized with a couple of intervened music instruments, audiovisuals, an installation emphatically absorbed by museographic try-ons, and photographic collages, highlights the false expectations of the contemporary artist, the homage to the square and to painting, but most of all, the homage to pop culture located in the limit of absolute vulgarity and the sublime. All of this appointing to blurred expectations or, as Santamarina mentions, exploring the possibilities of salt sculpture tasks”.

Even the artist’s announcement of a total freedom march, his work moves through a multidimensional kind of filter: Guillermo’s fondness about the past. His feelings towards moments and icons from Western Modern Art History, movie decoration, Museography, Music and indiscriminate sound, Vinyl records, or his personal history that comes out in imaginary alphabets and color codes only known to their creator. Finally, the artist juxtaposes, cancels, breaks up or obliterates with video projections, found stickers or duct tape.

Another way to enter this exhibition is recalling the works that were cast away. In the past, or as a possibility, Homage to Jean Genet, three green apples, a Debussy record, fresh lavender and a tin lamb doll; Neu! World Order, six low-budget copy prints from Neu!’s vinyl; and Dormimundo, a carpet with a well-known Mexican mattress shop logo. Then there is the first idea for the exhibition: a waiting room, a casting room and a filming studio, a study on the relation between youth and music, and the way it is perceived by society, the News Divine, Ten or more (Possible) Reasons for the Sadness of Thought.

Repression as a creative force, the abolition of the revolutionary chant, the search for new plastic principles.

Project in collaboration with Maurcio Marcin.

Guillermo Santamarina (Mexico 1957). Since 1980 has collaborated in the emergence, education, and projection processes of at least 3 generations of visual and sound artists. Organizer of more than 200 exhibitions, set in institutional and independent frames, as well as various Site-specific projects, Music and Performance International festivals, and Art theory encounters. Founder member and Content Advisor for SITAC (Contemporary Art Theory International Symposium). Commissioner for the Mexican representation at various World-renowned exhibitions (Johannesburg, Istanbul, Sao Paulo, etc.). Teaches Art History and Contemporary Theory subjects at different universities and Art schools. Former Director of Ex Teresa Arte Actual (INBA), from 1998 to 2004. Currently in charge of the programs of Museo Experimental El Eco(UNAM).

Special thanks to: David Miranda, Begoña Inchaurrandieta, Enrique Minjares, Rogelio Sikander, Francisco Outon y Miguel Marcin