JUANELE INTERVIEWS SAN POGGIO JULY 2, 2010 • CENTRO CULTURAL RECOLETA • BUENOS AIRES
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San Poggio attracted Juanele’s attention at a show at Jardín Oculto, a small gallery in San Telmo that often features young artists. I’m personally attracted to art that seems to come from another world rather than from a fertile imagination in our own, drawn from the observations of an eye looking into a place that few have ever seen. There’s an element of the outsider and the archeologist and sometimes the naturalist to all my favorite artists of the Río de la Plata and the found universes they depict never quite touch down with reality. Resisting the breezy naive styles becoming more popular among Buenos Aires’s young artists, San Poggio’s carefully plotted larger paintings reveal scenes from a history, revealed not from left to right but diagonally, at 45° angles to the others. Characters and motifs repeat and suggest a common sensibility and culture but not necessarily linear time. His rhomboid paintings cut a tiny, mysterious tableau out of what is no doubt a larger milieu extending on all sides. They’re vaguely disturbing and meticulously composed and painted. But, for all the repetition, nothing looks the same; everything is strange.
san poggio explains the continuity of rhomboids, sci-fi logics and the paradox of repetitious forms GABRIELA SCHEVACH: I would like to ask you, is there a logic to your geometry? SAN POGGIO: Yes, there are a series of stories that develop while I am doing the work. When I include a character, then it either relates to an object or that character is repeated and relates to another character. I repeat it in another part of the painting. As for instance this, that appears many times, going up with the rock that is also the main thing in this piece [he shows the red rock]. Then they start to relate to each other within the whole painting. Or these characters [He indicates the small figures in white suits that resemble Hazmat technicians.) who are guarding, interacting with objects like the little birds and flowers. GS: There is also a contrast between this object at the center and the empty screen that’s flat. SP: Yes, yes. Regarding the structure, I tend to start distributing the objects and then, in this distributing of objects and characters, to form the mystery of the work, which allows the observer to create his or her own story. GS: In this painting as in others, I see a relation to the earth, that is formless and contrasts with the strong geometry of the rest of the painting. SP: Yes, there is a contraposition between the hard, geometric architectonical and the more organic, that is the earth, the plants, the characters, the meat
[he points to the painting]. This, that’s like meat, viscera, which look like the stone. The crowds, who are also meat, as the plants, as the staircase, they are squashed together. Or the bricks... There is this opposition to geometry. GS: And the same happens with fire, that’s not directly depicted, but there is smoke. SP: Yes, the fire is extinguished. There is one thing I haven’t included here, but I used to include the subject of water in other paintings. Here’s no water, everything’s dry. There is even the appearance of fire, that’s not explicitly depicted, but there are the remains. But water isn’t there. GS: And the sky appears as a painted surface. SP: Yes, it opens up a great fiction about nature. And plants are fitted onto balconies, which isn’t something that grows in nature, but it’s being put there. The characters are doing certain things. Everything is very much programmed, more than left to chance, though there are hints about this, each has a function.
GS: At this section we see spectators who look, the structure of the look is present in its different forms. SP: Yes, they overlap, the scene repeats itself, but with differing levels of observation. Behind here could be someone. This girl, who is present in this, then these are present here and several characters are repeated. Then, these are present in this; and that’s something more chaotic. [San Poggio points to several parts of the painting.] GS: And, respectively, this is a kind of stage that is being looked at and this here is also a kind of stage, but mixed with earth, that supposedly belongs to nature. SP: And there, this structure is again repeated, with those four niches, but with another disposition. It separates here to accumulate the stones. GS: It would be easy to ask you where this little world is coming from... SP: Well, I take everything I absorb in my life, what I have personally experienced, what I’ve read, what I’ve watched on TV, cinema, literature, everything I’ve consumed during my life, I throw it all onto the work. While I’m making it, I remember this and that thing and I relate it to what I’m doing at the moment. There are relations with a lot of things that could relate to other works. But I prefer the work to be a standalone piece that doesn’t depend on readings or
on other texts or cultural objects. I prefer that the spectator doesn’t need all that previous knowledge, that he or she can invent a story, not needing to have the knowledge about the origins of the piece. GS: When I was looking at this series I was thinking how the rhomboidal format can’t be reproduced by a camera. Is this perhaps a specific form belonging to painting? SP: Objects have always interested very much. I’m very interested in incunabular books and all the Middle Ages’ works, where some formats are rhomboidal. And I’m interested in the object itself, be it a painting, be it an object. But it’s also for other matters, that the painting is more dynamic than a square that is quiescent. A rhombus has another dynamics. GS: A rhombus establishes a kind of continuity? SP: Oh, yes. In many examples I give hints that things go on. Even here the line could be endless. GS: And there is the feeling that these are situations of which we are seeing just a fragment, a piece that doesn’t explain much.
SP: In this one, in these small [paintings], except in two, there is no public, no witnesses. In the big one there is a public. These are scenes, they are like pieces of a big spectacle. GS: And here; these bones; do they have to do with what you’ve said about meat, the formless, as something out of control with respect to the architectural? SP: Yes, it could be that. I had thought the bones as something like the devil - it’s also related to the geometric - or maybe it’s the remains of something that’s not really funny, but mostly mysterious and macabre. GS: To wrap up, I understand you made your first solo show at age 15. SP: Oh, yes. In a neighborhood library in La Plata. Then I went to the Fine Arts High School in La Plata, then I continued at the university and went on showing work, sometimes in solo exhibits, sometimes in group shows. In March I exhibited at Jardín Oculto, which is the gallery I work with. Before there were other shows, at Centro Cultural Borges, another one at Jardín Oculto, at the MACLA, which is the Art Museum in La Plata.
GS: Please tell us a bit about the books you’ve made that, from what I saw, are related to your interest in incunabular books. SP: Ah, the books belong to a series I started in 2003, that consisted in false books. I did the cover and perhaps some loose pages. I showed all of them as if it were a collection of books belonging to some kind of society or non-existing culture. Afterwards I put it together in a big series entitled Antropología Ficción (Anthrophology Fiction). In the series, boxes of VHS of false films followed the false books. And then, a series of packaging, that were also false. There was the container with all the instructions and that was the big series. I did the books in 2003-2004, the video cases in 2005 and the packaging in 2007 and 2008. The series is still open, it’s still possible to make other things. GS: And that’s perhaps related to the logics and paradoxes of sci-fi? SP: Yes, what I had at first set out with the books was the matter that books are taken as something that tells the truth. Almost the sole support to tell that something is true is to say “I read it in a book or I found it at the library. I question that idea because books can in reality tell whatever the authors want and what is true and what isn’t, what reality is, well.. there’s lots of questions (laughs). GS: And what’s your personal relation to books or literature?
SP: I read a lot, yes. I like the book as an object most of all. I always read, I have many books and I’m interested in the book as object. I like it. I also like a lot of other objects: Ornaments, for instance, some times entirely useless. Little dolls, toys, ornaments, I don’t know, vases, anything. There are objects I like to see and perhaps to understand the crazy things inside the person who made them (laughs). San Poggio’s blog: sanpoggio.blogspot.com
Interview and photographs by Gabriela Schevach Design by Rick Powell Released under a Creative Commons Attribution - Non Commercial - NoDerivs License
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