Ramiro Carrillo
Juan José Valencia (Tenerife, 1980) cites Morandi when he states:"I believe that nothing can become more abstract and more unreal than what we see". A good clue: observation, if it is understood as a critical process, implies looking at the "abstract and unreal" nature of what we see as well as at the rhetorical, cultural and ideological character of our way of seeing.
Valencia works in this direction by looking at contemporary images, reflecting on the rhetoric of representation and the hierarchies of observation. His painting is designed to make it clear that it reproduces photographs, which necessarily indicates that he is proposing a discourse on representation, a discourse which, as we shall see, is of a critical nature. Valencia takes photography as the subject of painting, but it is obvious that his aim is not to emulate the photographic image, but to discuss it. His painting demonstrates as clearly his link as his distance from the photographic, and in that tension a space is opened for a debate, sensitive but at the same time violent, on representation.
However, it is not a work that is reduced to the development of a theoretical discourse. Valencia is not a library artist but a studio artist, he works as a painter, he speculates on the meaning of what he is painting and of the very act of painting, he seeks to establish intuitive and sometimes labyrinthine paths to orient himself among the complexity of his themes. But at the same time, in his paintings, his swirling and muddy brushstroke enters into permanent conflict with the eye's need to recompose the defined figure of the image it recognizes in the picture, and this generates an effect, so to speak, that is stressful: the power of the pictorial surface of his works reveals an ostentatious and overwhelming subtext, an obviously intentional disturbance that prevents the eye from "resting" on the image.
This effect starts from the very arrangement with which the photograph is used. Valencia does not paint a photograph in order to copy it and thereby abide by the discourses it contains, but on the contrary, it does so in order to debate the value as a signifier and as the meaning that that particular image has in the collective imagination. This is evident in the very fact that this author reproduces - or rather, reinterprets - well-known photographs, of those we have all seen or think we have seen at some time. In other words, Valencia does not paint astronauts: it paints the photographs of astronauts that form part of the repertoires with which the American and Soviet space agencies publicised their achievements and constructed the imaginary of the conquest of space. Consequently, the subject of these oil paintings is not the astronaut we can see in them, but the symbolic, semantic or psychological value that that particular photographic image may have for us; this is what is being discussed here.
But what do we mean when we talk about the "symbolic, semantic or psychological value" of an image? Obviously we know that the meanings of things depend on subjectivities and therefore are open and flexible, but also that they work by layers or textures that are intermingled in many ways at once; unraveling that mess requires sharp observation. At first glance, photographs of astronauts in space are often assumed to be images without ideology: despite knowing that the space race responds to the concrete geostrategic interests of the superpowers, the account of the milestones of the conquest of space presents them as achievements of Humanity, they appear as images of scientific and technological epiphany. There is no mention of the fact that some American military men were on the Moon, there is talk of Man stepping on the Moon, which is a self-serving fallacy.
On another level, let's say psychological, the astronaut floating in the void speaks of weightlessness -as the absence of soil- and the loneliness of the human being; at the same time we can conceive the astronaut as the freest being -floating in space- and at the same time the most prisoner -caught in his space suit-. Perhaps this could be seen as a melancholy image of the painter's own solitude, observing without being seen, as important as it is invisible; the telescope that appears in other of his paintings would then be the transcript of the study, of the place of observation. It may be that Valencia is interested in these dimensions of the meaning of his images or it may not be; be that as it may, I think that the key question about these paintings is that they brutally attack the epidermis that constitutes the most powerful message of the photographs he paints: the shining texture of a defined, contrasted, hypernithic image, with the clear, clean, detailed and aseptic aspect that usually accompanies the images of scientific technology, even - or above all - those of consumption. An epidermis that seems to be real and implausible: we see something that is outside of experience and therefore unreal and abstract, but which is encoded with the kind of visual information - optical precision, sharpness and detail - that our eye has learned not to doubt.
By reproducing these photographs with the texture of thick brushstroke oil, Valencia highlights what is missing in these images: their original codification, and indirectly points out how this glossy codification, which we miss, conditions our gaze. Valencia states that his painting is about"strangeness before reality and its representation. Of the hierarchies and hegemony in relation to the order of things. Of the uneasiness of the spirit in the face of this uncertainty". This is perhaps an excellent definition for his oil paintings: his painting is uneasy, lacks calm, it rolls in the mud what we consider normal.
The irregular, dry and thick epidermis of his oils destroys the original appearance of the photograph he is working with; it perverts or distorts it. It is as if he reproduces the photo with the skin upside down, injecting imprecision, contingency, carnality and vehemence into an image of technological fullness, stretching the image towards an absurdity: the extravagant and powerful conflict derived from representing the ethereal weightlessness of the image with the gross gravity of the painting.
His oil paintings annihilate both the idea of technical precision sought by traditional painting and the condition of photography as proof of the verisimilitude of the scientific-technological epic, demonstrating that both spheres, the dimension of the pictorial and that of technology, are no more than codified languages, representations, sometimes so effective that we confuse them with the reality we see.
In his works, painting unfolds in a conflict that highlights its critical potential, showing what in my opinion is its greatest virtue in the century of images: its splendid inability to offer a plausible illusion of visual reality. It no longer has the capacity to be evidence of distant truths or realities or to generate convincing illusions, which is why the ideology of the paintings is now forever subject to critical observation, to the exercise of thought. This is the invaluable vulnerability of painting.