MATEO LÓPEZ: AN OEUVRE ADRIFT FROM THE CONTINENT
In Mateo López’s oeuvre, drawing and its three dimensional projections are analogous to the hand that gropingly explores the world, spreading out into lines over the space with a playfulness that evokes Plato’s Myth of the Cave. The artist puts reality to the test: he captures the instability of every vision or duplicates existing things through the use of works that are fictions, simulated copies of the object he constructs with affective attention to detail. The result is an art which is incessantly “adrift” as stated in the title of his artist’s book: an art that dares to take risks in order to seek the obverse and the reverse of limits and possibilities of his “laboratory of forms”, forms which are often split into two. Each piece is an exploration conceived as an open and “exposed” work: the artist is aware of the double meaning of the word, implying both dis- played for viewing and vulnerable to the gaze. His works often function as traces of an unceasing exploration, sometimes as residues of that which has been glimpsed, or as proofs of the exploration in progress and they are, in a way, fragments that contain the whole; nascent logbooks of an oevre that is as much a meta art as it is a personal diary.
In fact, in his particular relationship with objects there is an awareness that things narrate stories, and at the same time, there is the pleasure of contemplating (scopophilia) the passage from the imagined to the constructed that drawing allows.
The experience of frequent relocations during his childhood in which things were rearranged in the new spaces and seemed to take on new shapes is linked to his exploring the transformation of objects. He recreates and reposi- tions them on paper or in his installations as signs of anecdotes, and as a vital trace. His is an art reflection of his own strategies and of the inhabited world. It is an oeuvre without final forms. Without a definitive place in which to be installed. And in that work, his smile is a key factor. The open nature of his works connects them to randomness, which he, in turn, incorporates by iconographically narrating each exploratory encounter as a way of indicating that the real work is beyond this.
Invited by KBK Gallery to present a solo show in the Federal District, Mateo López went from calculating the number of inhabitants in one of the most densely populated cities in the planet to calculating the number of pairs of shoes, and this served as inspiration for the simulated situation of a shoe maker traveling to Mexico City to work there. This fiction, connected of course to the legendary empty shoe box exhibited by Gabriel Orozco in Venice and to Francis Alÿs’s walks in the urban chaos, was the matrix of his exhibition. He transformed the shoe box into the shoemaker’s room, which contained a world of paper objects: from the work tools to the manufactured shoes. A specular space in which the leading character was the dual version of the artist, and the pieces were duplications that contained Mateo López’s smile.
In ArtBo 2009, he literally “transformed” the space of a gallery stand into a fair. The place habitually hidden from the public hosted “the work” with the instructions “take a glove and turn it inside out” while the traces of the mounting (a fictitious lace box, among other objects) were displayed. The on site installation contained a caustic mockery of fairs.
López’s skepticism regarding the art object allows him to exhibit a lightness that is neither cynical nor devoid of hope, and that is reminiscent of Calvino’s proposals. In his simulations, in his plays with inside and outside, right or wrong side, or in his way of combining the external space and the mental space, there is a permanent invitation for the spectator to delve into the intimate as something inseparable from the “seams” between art and reality.
At Casas Riegner Gallery in Bogotá, López installed a replica of his workshop which included not only its tables, work materials and drawings in progress, but also his own presence, with the aim of mounting the exhibition before the eyes of the public during the month assigned to this end. Instead of transform- ing the family home into the artwork, like Kurt Schwitters did with his Merzbau, López altered the gallery space, transforming it into a mirror-workshop in which he transgressed the solitary atmosphere of creation and thus revealed it. Besides the derivation from Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise, which consisted not in reproducing the whole work and making it portable but in rendering the whole studio trans-portable, there was an element of “performance” in the action. It was not only a work within a work, but it also included the physical presence of the artist, exposed to a mental rather than a physical limit.
On the day of the opening, the only work on exhibit was the drawing represented on the invitation card, framed and displayed in an exhibition hall.And a space intervened with an artificial wall hosted the artist at work. The spectators went through empty exhibition halls, and when they took a look inside that room, they did not know whether it was a part of the gallery offices. “Curious people found drawings, objects, and when they discovered that they were fictitious, the whole space became relative,” evokes Mateo, for whom the key lies not only in connecting the viewer with the anecdotes that each drawing contains and in showing him/her the processes of art, but also in abandoning the sacred notion of the framed, fitted, protected art object.” Paper rulers and cardboard scissors do not only play with the copy of a model; they also play with the awareness of fleetingness. Besides, they refer the viewer to the unnoticed rituals of intimacy present in the relationship with objects. They even reflect a mode of nostalgia that is distilled in the smile. While it is true that they resemble the gesture through which Edward Hopper reproduced the paintings he had sold, it is also true that they involve a certain avowed skepticism regarding the art object in relation to the market.
Mateo López’s drifts include his work Diario de Motocicleta, a two-month journey through four Colombian cities he embarked on riding the motorcycle he has used since he was fifteen. He incorporated it in the exhibition space together with fragments of the iconographic “diary” of the trip the objects he compiled, the documentary photographs, the drawings made along the way which he exhibited at an artists’ meeting in Medellín and at Jenny Vilà Arte Contemporáneo Gallery in Cali. The portable/transportable studio now became the suitcase containing his notebooks, and he used museum or exhibition spaces as temporary parking lots for his motorcycle. The traveling exhibit culminated at Casas Riegner Gallery, featuring a very long horizontal table on which objects such as a basket or a rock weighing eight kilograms consti- tuted both the map of a very personal journey and a sort of topography of the visited areas. That work was the antecedent of his explorations of Colombia’s railways, once great works of engineering, which had been non-operative for decades. The abandoned stations, frozen in time, became metaphorical spaces representing a process of modernization which has fallen into oblivion. Mateo López used the CIFO 2008 scholarship to begin to develop a stage of Viaje sin movimiento (Motionless trip). He toured the Western Railway line compiling information, conducting interviews, taking pictures, even making models of the stations. Other fragmentary explorations, such as those exhibited at the Jumex group show, The Traveling Show, have become a way of rescuing memory in which the documentary graphic and oral is incorporated in the fictitious objects and deposits in little things the duplication of an object, the notes about a walk, the fragment of a heard melody the possibility of conjuring the deterioration of time, the wind that sweeps away traces, the great stories. One is moved by the unexpected power of the logbook, endlessly under construction, of an artist adrift in his approach to the paradoxes of contemporary time in Latin America.
