Oscar d’Empaire
Universidad Rafael Urdaneta, Maracaibo
As part of the development of the theme of assemblage, Oscar d’Empaire (Venezuela. Edo Zulia, 1930) is featuring his most recent show, where he exalts the use of iron and welding, which he fuses with elements that were previously everyday- life waste materials, none of which has been conceived as an art object. They also show an ecologic bent, since they offer a new reading for objects that have been abandoned by present- day consumer man.
The word assemblage originates in the French term “ensemble”, which means both to gather and to put together. It was coined in 1953 by the French artist Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) – with its roots in Duchamp and Picasso – and became established at an exhibition on the subject held at the MoMA, in 1961, and curated by William C. Sietz. Thus, by merging elements that are basically different, assemblage renovates forms, replacing liter- al values with tonal ones.
D’Empaire does not seek to imitate, rather, he seeks to change genres in order to subvert tradition- al iconography. Oscar d’Empaire renews his fantastic inventory, in which he combines his unlimited curiosity with humor and certain playful spirit, reflected in some of the titles of the works: Torquemada’s Toy, Spatial Mower, Machine for Grinding Ideas. Here the master makes fun of himself − or perhaps, of us. His is an “aesthetics of accumulation” in which, definitively, the artist always reinvents himself, as in the pieces using scraps, the shoe patterns or the chess boards. All of these are “found” bodies that d’Empaire rescues from the disdain of their previous owners or from the indifference with which technology treats the object considered obsolete to induce the pur- chase of state-of-the art technology.
