Julián Gatto

Indeed I can hardly think of a piece that represents me. The first thing that comes to my mind are parts of different drawings, details. And those details are very significant to me because they respond to an idea that I'm trying to articulate all the time: basically that the means that I use to draw become drawn. That watercolor is transformed into wood or water or mold, or that the pen is rock or tree bark or coal. It happens sometimes and sometimes not. I'm still not sure it's something you can control. I think it is more about trying to create the necessary conditions and see if it could actually happen.

It is not for me to suggest how one reads what I do. I am interested that each person generates his own way of reading. I just try to create a series of conditions in the drawing that respond somehow to different circumstances: weather, moods, situations, and spaces. Some time ago a friend gave me an interview given by Arnaldo Calveyra where he said he wanted to achieve a kind of heat energy, the one that occurs when words are joined together. I would like someday to achieve something similar but with pictures.

"Tradition? What tradition? The tradition disappeared. Now all fleets at once, in a sort of suspiciously warm pool. So, contemporaries reference are ALL that matter. That surely is the same as saying NOTHING: "Nothing, if you can!". Of course there are some that swim with much style! (Even though the pool is all piss) and they have been doing it for a long time! Others jump - pump and sink quickly. Others play in the dirty sand. Others like me splash (or we throw armful like drowning). But seriously, I'd love to be recognizable within a tradition. The watercolors of Xul Solar, Dürer and Palmer, pictures of Atget and Fenton, the portraits of Holbein, Tarkosvky films, Ozu, Bresson, the prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige ... I do not know if you can. Maybe. Not sure, but I think it's time to stop being at odds with the past, or complain about how much it weighs.

I think I still lack that sense of perspective (ten years ago I was 16) like to say what was or not significant in the last decade and a half. But considering this limitation I will mention two things fairly recent that moved me considerable: one is the management and the space created by the people of Medanos, first as Cultural Centro and then mutated into its present form, viAjo. I think their proposal will be key in the process of trying to generate a much more interesting and dynamic discussion in terms of practices, strategies, interaction and above all, the articulation of new spaces for meeting people and the generation of employment, or energy in the Argentina of the XXI century. XXI is the future and has already started! The second thing was the Hawaii Project, photo editing, video, music, poetry, embroidery and drawings curated by Guillermo Ueno. It was significant, I think, because it began and ended (all good things end and Hawaii ended right when it had to) and within those 3 or 4 years it opened a large number of possibilities (Let’s wait to seen if anyone will take the lead of what Hawaii opened) and created the type of format that is necessary for all those intimate gestures, those that are enhanced when they converge exponentially.

I think this brings us back to the topic of tradition, as everything is so fragmented, the trends are varied and they change every month because no one knows what will happen. But we all know that something must be sold. What most strikes me is the boom in Argentina of the "young" art. Everything is "young". I too am a "young artist" by now. Even the artists with more ...ajam!, experience… seek to irradiate that "young" look. The "young", novelty, novelty. The other day I was talking with a friend (who is also young) and she told me she had no time to read a book from beginning to end. (Her work is trashy, she pastes things with scotch tape, makes rolls of paper aluminum, etc). She is very intelligent and super informed on everything that responds to the contemporary category, of course. "I glue things like that because they are urgent, there is no time for it to look good. There are more important things" she said. And it's true. There are more important things. The novelty (for now) is the trash. There is much, much trash. And there is much much anxiousness and it is not enough to live it in the flesh, now we also have to look at it and appreciate it. I guess for many it is significant or new, or radical or subversive. But what is new and radical about being a victim of the running times? What's subversive about the ugliness, when we live in a world in which, practically, almost everything around us is horrible? What is significant in the clumping of objects of consumption (whether waste or not) in a position to obey the laws and logic of the system? The Surrealists proved better than anyone the subversive power inherent in objects without much artifice. Only with imagination and poetry. I recently saw the chessboard designed by André Breton: crystal glasses of different sizes, 16 filled with white wine and 16 red wine, on a board made of mirrors.