27 October – 11 December 2010
Opening:
Wednesday, 27 October, 20-22 h.
Conde de Xiquena, 5
8004 Madrid, Spain
T [+34] 915 210 382
General info: info [at] casadosantapau.com
Opening hours:
Tuesday-Friday, 11-14 h. / 16.30 to 20.30 h.
Saturday, 11-14 h. + by appointment
www.casadosantapau.com
Both Abdul Vas (Suriname, 1981) and his interdisciplinary work are difficult to classify. You can find references to the work of artists with such impact in the history of avant-garde as James Ensor, to German expressionism, or to the most radical ideas of Italian trans-vanguard. His work tackles a new language that has nothing to do with the construction of a solid discourse, more or less adequate to the usual prevailing canons. There is nothing common about Vas’ work. It’s wild. It doesn’t work under the aegis of any school nor teacher. It’s genuinely contaminated. It’s bizarre and tacky. And it is precisely because it follows no formula, respects no form, no control, that it emerges as one of the most attention-grabbing approaches within our dull and mild artistic panorama.
The argument the project’s exposition raises, with this new Casado Santapau’s project we’re referring to, is framed by this whole, enormous projection of elements, but it specifically talks about the relationship of a new race of humanoid chickens with machines. To be more precise, with big freight transportation artifacts such as Navistar trucks: symbol of North American imperialist power. And so it is, in Vas’s invented universe, that the birds—in an attempt to find AC/DC within the confines of the galaxy—have become mixed up with these super machines, giving way to a hybrid a la “Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors.” The drawings in this series allude to the super chickens’ symbiosis with the new model of Lonestar trucks and its commercial routes, designed to spread the message of the new race.
In this new world order ruled by chickens, postmodern iconography, the fan phenomenon and commercial routes have been assimilated by the new regime. Now chickens are the rock stars, the mafiosi, the high-class prostitutes, the basketball players or the truckers. Chickens impose the rules. They have taken possession of human’s agonic references as well as their social structure, making sure that the message of AC/DC, heroes of hard rock, becomes the new ideological Decalogue.
This is not the prologue of some apocalyptic science-fiction series, but the constituent principles of the world imagined by Abdul Vas. An iconoclastic universe, based on the taxonomic description of an endless number of characters who subvert the ideas of westernization, gender and belonging. It is altogether monstrous.
—Edu Hurtado
