Adriana Arenas
Disreality
Cámara de Comercio de Bogotá
Sede Chapinero
Dirección: Calle 67 No. 8-32/44
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The World Thunderstruck
déréalité / disreality
Sentiment of absence and withdrawal of reality experienced by the amorous subject, confronting the world.
Roland Barthes
A Lover’s Discourse
In this work Adriana Arenas inaugurates another phase in her artistic trajectory; she adopts a new strategy to refer to the structures that impose themselves on the subject in the creation of ‘reality’. At the same time she interrogates the role of memory within this process.
It isn’t the first time that the artist works with holograms, nor is it the first time that she focuses in such a detailed way on the natural world that surrounds her. On the one hand the hologram alludes to the fragile nature of reality; an illusory and fleeting projection that takes shape in the mind’s eye; an ethereal experience that constitutes the poetics of the visible and thus will always be intangible. On the other hand her attention to detail conveys the awesome and enigmatic power of the natural world, a world that re-invents itself with every passing moment and yet is too easily taken for granted.
However it is the first time that these two tangents are united in one oeuvre in which the spectator finds him/herself implicated. As audience we are forced to draw our own conclusions, gleaned from myriad gazes both contrasting and parallel, always already compromised.
In the confrontation between spectator and art work, mechanisms of interpretation proliferate and with this the possible readings of the work.
Equally this is the first time that Adriana Arenas includes imagery of the cosmos and with this the notion of the infinite, a theme formerly evoked rather than addressed directly.
Since beginning her work with holographic images in 2007 Adriana has insisted on the illusion of reality and to this end on the inherently narrative nature of that which we perceive. She has made it her place to challenge the connection between the images we see and the realities which we create and within which we are confined.
Thus the metaphor of the waterfall or shower is born as the defining image of the natural world, of all that is fluid and to this end constantly transgressing different levels of reality, inciting abrupt changes in movement and exploring the boundaries of time.
The fluidity at the heart of her work, conveyed in part through the use of celestial maps that rotate constantly, evokes by the same token the uneasy and unknowable machinery which controls the relationship between the familiar and alien. In the push and pull between the immediate and the remote, the very certainty of the near, ‘knowable’ world is undermined.
As with the Danish artist Olafur Elliason whose work captures the magic behind the natural world, Adriana Arenas takes her audience on a journey in which they are forced to confront the illusion of that which they take for granted and so realize that reality is not something easily explained or illustrated. Instead it is the fruit of a fluctuating stream of communication, of a creative tension between the immediate and the remote. For this reason there will always be an infinite number of readings none of them sufficient in themselves yet each valid under the eternal horizon of meaning.
So it is that Adriana Arenas, like Olafur Elliason, conveys the overwhelming responsibility of the artist with his/her society for it is they who have the power to create images and offer new points of reference. Ultimately it is the figure of the artist who opens up new paths of communication and diverse grounds of interpretation, he/she can chose to do so either from those intransigent preconception or from the hitherto unimagined hues of the possible.
Maria Ioviono
Translated by: Maria Elisa Moorwood Pinzón
