País extraño IV
Solo show by Elián Stolarsky
País extraño IV
Solo show by Elián Stolarsky
19 October - 24 November 2023
Credits
Adriana F. Pauly
Goro Studio
Dossier
Download"I can see that picture of what we were at an earlier stage may not be recognisable and cannot, certainly, be pleasing to contemplate in later life. But we must not repudiate it, for it is a proof that we have really lived..."
Marcel Proust
Elián Stolarsky's work confronts us with an abstract, ominously familiar past. Fragment by fragment, zooming in and out, allusions to strange territories and bodies overlap and come together.
The artist's gestures, retracing line by line Robert Cappa’s photographs, taken to document the Spanish Civil War, function as building blocks of an image beyond our reach. The textiles reveal their stitching like scars, in which we recognize movements, gestures, wounds, faces and bodies, all archiving a violence inherited. They challenge us to weave a fabric of memories in which images of the past, present and future can be exchanged.
The title of the series "País extraño" refers to David Lowenthal's book The past is a Foreign Country, taking its accidentally erroneous translation as a starting point, this series shows the chronological development of an investigation that begins with the artist's heritage as a Polish Jewish descendant through family photographs and extends itself, in the case of this chapter, to the national context that surrounds her. The artist, far from establishing claims, calls to action or positioning herself, seeks to analyze the representation and narration of historical events through photographic archives, blurring the distance between "them" (the bad, the represented, the distance, the past) and "us" (the good, the spectators, the near, the present).
Walter Benjamin in Small History of Photography says in relation to David Octavius Hill's photographs that "there remains something that is not consumed in the testimony of art..., something that cannot be silenced, that is indomitable and claims the name of the one who lived here and is still really here, without ever wanting to enter into art at all." That untamable aura, as Benjamin calls it, can also be found in the rawness of Cappa's photographs and asserts its presence in Stolarsky’s reconfiguration of the image. Stripped of their context the artist’s works, mounted like loose pages of an atlas, show us drawings embedded in the anonymous physiognomy of the landscapes depicted on the fabrics. Figures that could be sleeping or taking a stroll in reality belong to a story beyond our reach. They are revealed only when we approach and confront them directly, however in doing so we loose the perspective of the entire work. That aura, and its anchor to time and space, becomes detached from the territory marked by cruelty and yields to a landscape and figures imbued with meanings from our subconscious. The images emancipate from their historical origin to create narratives within the present.
The artist's gestures, retracing line by line Robert Cappa’s photographs, taken to document the Spanish Civil War, function as building blocks of an image beyond our reach. The textiles reveal their stitching like scars, in which we recognize movements, gestures, wounds, faces and bodies, all archiving a violence inherited. They challenge us to weave a fabric of memories in which images of the past, present and future can be exchanged.
The title of the series "País extraño" refers to David Lowenthal's book The past is a Foreign Country, taking its accidentally erroneous translation as a starting point, this series shows the chronological development of an investigation that begins with the artist's heritage as a Polish Jewish descendant through family photographs and extends itself, in the case of this chapter, to the national context that surrounds her. The artist, far from establishing claims, calls to action or positioning herself, seeks to analyze the representation and narration of historical events through photographic archives, blurring the distance between "them" (the bad, the represented, the distance, the past) and "us" (the good, the spectators, the near, the present).
Walter Benjamin in Small History of Photography says in relation to David Octavius Hill's photographs that "there remains something that is not consumed in the testimony of art..., something that cannot be silenced, that is indomitable and claims the name of the one who lived here and is still really here, without ever wanting to enter into art at all." That untamable aura, as Benjamin calls it, can also be found in the rawness of Cappa's photographs and asserts its presence in Stolarsky’s reconfiguration of the image. Stripped of their context the artist’s works, mounted like loose pages of an atlas, show us drawings embedded in the anonymous physiognomy of the landscapes depicted on the fabrics. Figures that could be sleeping or taking a stroll in reality belong to a story beyond our reach. They are revealed only when we approach and confront them directly, however in doing so we loose the perspective of the entire work. That aura, and its anchor to time and space, becomes detached from the territory marked by cruelty and yields to a landscape and figures imbued with meanings from our subconscious. The images emancipate from their historical origin to create narratives within the present.
