The artist as a translator.

The thematic of the show proposed for ARTBO 2019 takes its title from the text of Walter Benjamin from 1923. 

Although art is not a language, metaphorically it is understood that all visual praxis has a repertoire of identifiable means of expression. In that sense, we think that the artist acts as a ‘translator’ when faced with interpreting, reformulating or transgressing the approaches and codes of periods of art history, and/or other media such as film or photography. Each medium works between parameters that are conducive to the configuration of ideas hardly treatable with other technical or theoretical approaches. This is the challenge that three artists assume when transforming or interpreting existing ways to produce new work: the misrepresentation of the baroque concept of space and form; the translation of the photo and the cinema through technical subversion; the reformulation of the Atlas or Treaty to include the whole as a possibility. 

Julián Burgos is interested in painting as an affective space, where global hierarchies can be reorganized within the space of a painting. Taking as reference the language and color of baroque painting, as in the painting of the French Bouchon, Fragonard, or Poussin, the work is broken down as a digital fact; The reference to the dissolution of the baroque space is emphasized by recomposing fragments of the image. References to the consumption of the image, to the fragmentation of knowledge and humor of those who do not take any formulation as definitive permeate the work. 

Radenko Milak, always within his great project, University of Disaster, brings paintings and watercolors that again revolve around the great global imaginary of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In his recent work he explores in various directions the link between historical events and landscapes of violence, ruin and desolation. His work emphasizes social and political revolutions, which, by bringing them to the present, reinterprets and updates their meaning, while inviting the viewer to become a participant in a continuing tragedy. Its starting point is always the language of painting itself and its relation to the thematic content. Thus, their watercolors do not stop translating cinema or photography into new interpretative contexts. 

Juan Osorno presents a third regime of visuality by taking the Humboldt Treaty as the starting point of his drawings. His work revolves around encyclopedic historicism as a way of seeing the world, ordering it and, above all, imagining it. The treaty is understood as an Aleph, in the Borgian sense; it is the place where everything real and imaginary coexist in a spatial continuum that contains everything at the same time; It is the idea of ​​infinite time. It tells us about the possibility of the existence of something, and paradoxically, of a whole that contains not the existing, but the possible. 

‘The artist as a translator’ seeks to explore some contemporary actions towards the global interconnection between spaces, genres, and linguistic areas, but in addition to historical art times that dialogue with the contemporary world.