The seductive spell of terror: contemporary art in the abyss of the sublime | Culture

For romantic artists, the elusive idea of ​​the sublime took its most representative form in that image of The walker above the sea of ​​clouds (1818), by Caspar David Friedrich, the man who dares to peer into the abyss of nature and on that edge activates the ecstatic vertigo of knowing he is alive. Currently, the concept continues to spur the imagination of many creators who, through their works, explore the liminal territory where the apparently opposite paths of the terrifying and the pleasant intersect. Proof is the exhibition at the Espacio Solo in Madrid, Protection No Longer Assured, until the end of the year, where 63 works by 31 multidisciplinary artists are presented that address issues such as war and the lack of truths to cling to in these troubled times. The show marks the annual exhibition commitment of this private center that houses a collection of ultra-contemporary art, with a colorful pop and surreal line, and exercises patronage through programs and awards. On the tour, which can be visited for free by reservation, paintings, sculptures, videos and works made with artificial intelligence are intermingled under the sign of the immeasurable.

What could be imagined more sublime than the nuclear mushroom that expands in the heights, spreading its destruction over everything that walks on the earth. The “grandfather of Japanese pop”, Keiichi Tanaami, still active at 86, fills the blank page with an amalgamation of Western and Eastern references —from the pin ups to the manga— where not only the threat of armed conflict is planned, but also a psychedelia that points to another form of the sublime: that of psychoactive substances as a way of accessing expanded states of consciousness. Tanaami witnessed the ravages of the war first-hand during his childhood, while the Cuban Dagoberto Rodríguez grew up in a state of imminent danger, imposed by the Cold War, which never materialized in physical violence. Even so, there were the effects of the trauma on him and his compatriots. That is why his recurring obsession with the armed struggle, which here materializes in a series of clay sculptures that represent homemade projectiles improvised by the citizens of Aleppo (Syria) with butane canisters. “In Cuba they also trained us for this type of war, asymmetric warfare,” explained the artist, co-founder of the renowned Los Carpinteros collective, whose work, entitled Amphorae Iis exhibited next to the painting that gives its name to the exhibition: Protection No Longer Assuredby Canadian Ryan Heshka, a twist on the posters produced by governments in times of war to comfort the population, where the veiled truth is discovered: protection is no longer guaranteed.

In the same sack of the sublime where the visions of the end of the world fall, reflections on the -depending on how you look at it- paradisiacal hell or infernal paradise of the digital universe find a place. If the landscapes that opened up before the absorbed gaze of the inhabitants of the 19th century were painted with forests, mountains and clouds, what appears before the eyes of contemporary humans has more to do with ones and zeros, with memes, pop uptabs and likes. Pieces like those of Ulysses Soloa research project promoted by Espacio Solo that is made up of a set of images accompanied by texts created (both) with artificial intelligence based on phrases by Marcel Duchamp, addressing the certainty that our brains are always trying to find connections to weave together stories from what we see.

Evoking the analog past to reflect on the digital present, Cuban Glenda León presents a typewriter that uses matches instead of paper, titled incendiary speech. “It is a piece that is part of a series of intervened typewriters that refer to the written, spoken and imagined word, in relation to the new dimension that they have acquired on the networks”, he points out. The Spanish Grip Face, who, like the Cuban artist, participated in the presentation, experiments with the idea of ​​the mask as a symbol of “digital anonymity and the manipulation of identity in the virtual world, which can have its positive, but also destructive side.” .

There are more ways to look at the sublime to mold it into works of art. The overwhelming sensation that the ground moves underfoot, that nothing remains and everything can change —and does change— suddenly makes up another of the thematic sections that articulate the show. The hyper-realistic sculptures of the Canadian David Altmejd, with characters like the protagonist of pyramid, a run-down businessman in the process of metamorphosis into a dog, give a good account of that anguish in the face of uncertainty, a feeling whose reverse is the possibility that always opens after a slammed door. “This artist works a lot with crystals as a symbol of the organic, that everything is a process”, points out Rebekah Rhodes, the Head of Publications for the Solo Collection, who defines Altmejd’s work as “contemporary Gothic”.

There are many more proposals to approach this philosophical and aesthetic idea: the paintings in which Jorge Ríos imagines the initial moments of the forging of myths, the imposing sculpture of a lion weighing one ton that Justin Matherly places on orthopedic walkers like symbol of the fragility of what appears to be solid or the lost room of the Prado Museum in which two neoclassical pillars stand out, on which Paco Pomet superimposes a date that is a sublime horror story: 11.9.01. The sublime, these artists come to say, is what attracts us because of its repulsive nature, what moves us and impresses us because it is inconceivable to us. It is also infinity on the head of a pin. Or the universe that the Argentine Mika Rottenberg paints on the nail of her index finger in her revolving sculpture fingers.