Jorge Cabieses

Those were times when it was possible in Lima to come into contact with foreign visual artists thanks to the Lima Biennials in which Jorge Cabieses participated as a coordinator, working with international guests and thus having access to an interchange I do not doubt must have been prolific for all those involved. After isolated experiences, and above all, after an intensive practice at the “Perú Fábrica” Workshop, Jorge Cabieses found a way to express that which was, at that moment, the object of his positions as an artist vis-à-vis society. He wanted to fuse painting and serigraphy in order to create new images which might become Post-modern re- readings of Rauschenberg or Warhol, but which were undoubtedly the product of a Peruvian artist, a man of universal knowledge.

However, instead of being a reproduction in Neo Pop terms which was, in one way or another, the primary filiation of this oeuvre something much more complex could be appreciated in a series of works in which he explored supports that were completely new to us (conglomerates of synthetic foams used in mattresses or flowery and multicolored fabrics), the icons resulting from our urban myths, whether they be religious, or associated to sports or folklore. It was with this series that he stood out in the competition sponsored by Telefónica, and he would later show it in Resistencias, an exhibition of contemporary Peruvian art featured at Casa de América in Madrid.

Gradually, a succession of commitments followed and his work became more complex as he experimented further with serigraphy. With the command of the craft he had acquired through his research with the Fábrica group, he turned to the search of images in publications or on walls in popular neighborhoods, simultaneously enhancing the fusion between serigraphy and painting, to which he remained faithful throughout the last seven years of his career.

The compilation of this iconography transformed Cabieses into a sort of archaeologist of popular culture integrating his findings into increasingly complex works. From this research process associated to the media Jorge Cabieses jumped to a stage of decontextualization of signage, in which the series devoted to the instructions delivered on airplanes as a precautionary measure is memorable. This series of works, which gave rise to the series Boarding Pass, exhibited in 2004 at Punctum Gallery, aroused special interest due to the fact that it was the first time that such a well-achieved fusion between the local and the international could be appreciated in Peru ́s contemporary art, in works whose rationality did not, in any way, obliterate the poetry of certain images, reproduced and contrasted with the color planes, as was the case in his first exhibition, Instrucción Manual, at Artco Gallery. It anticipated the future path he would tread: large formats, polyptychs whose results were close to the spirit of the Dadaist collages, in which the integration of images of radical appearance coalescing perfectly in a hallucinatory play of forms and spaces stood out.

Two years later, a radical change could be witnessed at Lucía de la Puente Gallery. In 2006, the exhibition Post, marked the beginning of the liberation from signage with a view to addressing new concerns through an essentially universal iconography, by means of which he situated us in a non-place that gathered together different symbolisms in a fusion of elements that a less gifted artist would have been unable to achieve with the degree of accuracy and full semiotic control that Cabieses obtained. In this exhibition he presented for the first time his memorable investigations in the field of CMYK (4-color process), focusing on engraving and dispensing with any kind of brushstroke to develop his characters through a new form of Pointillism that demanded the concentration of our retina to achieve the definition of the images that these surfaces contained. It must be pointed out that although some of the works included in Post – as well as those in the exhibition that followed – may have had an impact apparently derived from advertising, there is in all of these paintings a particular poetics, a refinement in the portrait of the female image, especially when he addresses an orientalism which becomes sensual or nostalgic in the case of female images, and turns chromatically aggressive in his image of Buddha, one of the best-achieved works from this 4-color process stage in which there is a preeminence of Japanese symbols fused with those of the Western World.

Post might be considered an inflection point in Jorge Cabieses ́s trajectory, because it was there that it was finally possible to appreciate the results of this arduous process, of this struggle with his/her own self in which each artist engages in order to be able to say what he/she has tried to say for many years. It was an exhibition that already evidenced the fulfillment of a goal with splendid results, while at the same time glimpsing new roads towards which it was possible to drift.

The new bearings would be appreciated in the next exhibition, Mecánica popular II, held in 2007 at Enlace Gallery. In this show we would see how the earlier four-color process had acquired volume, shifting from the virtual to the real through the use of confetti, usually used during Carnival and known to us as “pica–pica”, and which now served as background for monumental pictures, creating by means of these pointillist textures a subtle retinal movement that opposed the forcefulness of an image imprinted on the color plane in a space in which painting became increasingly important. In “Mecánica...” Jorge Cabieses resorted once again to the initial conglomerates, those based on foam for mattresses. If with the confetti he created an artisanal conglomerate, he also resorted to an industrial support the wood conglomerates which provided a very rich visual texture that served as a basis for the iconography developed on them.

But at Enlace new concerns could also be perceived, especially in the content of the images, on this occasion home scenes characteristic of the 1950s; creating an effect that invoked nostalgia and, at the same time, resorting to scale, he worked for the first time with the void, assigning priority to a space on which he dripped a blue blot. With that single element, Cabieses brought us back to contemporaneousness, for rather than being a pastiche, the work is based on the deliberate dialectic play which confronts past and present, content and form, the pictorial and the graphic, the global and the national image, transforming these works into some of the most complex and interesting in the panorama of our contemporary world.

In these new works he repeated a series of appropriations which he recontextualized in paintings that transformed the artist into a sort of snooper again the archaeological vocation who pries into unexpected spaces to find the images on which he may base his discourse. This could be appreciated in the installation presented in his most recent exhibition, where he hung along an entire wall, innumerable small-format paintings featuring found images drawn from different sources. Thus he created a hallucinatory set characterized by contrasts and ironic metaphors, the product of a time when the local culture cannot avoid being endowed with a global meaning, and erudition draws on the popular. This combination of collage, decals, drawings, serigraphy and all the mediums that may be available to the current artist ended up by demonstrating the permanent interaction between the intimate world of the workshop and the world outside.

In Jorge Cabieses ́s latest works, serigraphy has been relegated in favor of pure painting. The early poetics now reappears as a loose brushstroke on complex backgrounds, applied in layers to conclude with stripes moving freely from the upper part of the picture to form a sort of grid that ends up concealing the image. This final work, the product of an eminent research process, ratifies the permanent risk assumed by an artist of extraordinary consistency who, along his trajectory, has managed to tread that road running parallel between the personal and the social to achieve one of the richest and more complex oeuvres in the context of contemporary Peruvian art.

Profile :

Born in Lima in 1971. He had his artistic training at the “Corriente Alterna” School of Fine Arts, from where he graduated in the year 2000. Until 2003, he was a member of the collective PERÚ FÁBRICA, where he incorporated serigraphy as an artistic medium. He has had four solo shows: “Instrucción manual” (Artco Gallery, 2003); “Boarding Pass” (Punctum Gallery, 2004), “Post” (Lucía de la Puente Gallery, 2006) and “Mecánica Popular 2” (Enlace Arte Contemporáneo, 2007).
He has also participated in numerous group shows in Peru, the United States, Spain and Germany. He was a finalist in competitions such as “Pasaporte para un Artista”, organized by the French Embassy in Peru (2001, 2003 and 2006), in the Fifth Telefónica Competition (2001), and in the Phillips Award (2001 and 2002). He has participated in international fairs such as arteaméricas 2007, 2008 (Miami-USA), arteBA 2007 (Buenos Aires-Argentina), and ArtBO 2007 (Bogotá-Colombia). He currently serves as a professor in the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. He lives and works in Lima, Perú. He is represented by Galería Enlace Arte Contemporáneo.