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Luis Roldán.
  

  Solo Show
Luis Roldán
Casas Riegner Gallery
Issue #77
01/06/2010

Colombia, Bogotá
Institution:
Galeria Casas Riegner

Marta Rodriguez


Luis Roldán¿s Circunstancias is hermetic yet highly appealing because of its careful manufacture and the subtle way in which it intertwines its formal elements with a quotation from Marcel Proust¿s The Prisoner. On the invitation, and also on a wall inside the gallery, there was a text alluding to the circumstances of Bergotte¿s death. Days before his demise, Bergotte found himself before Vermeer¿s painting and said: ¿This is how I should have written. My last books are too dry, I should have given them several layers of color, I should have made my sentences precious in themselves, like that small yellow panel.¿ At the time of his death, ¿his own life appeared before him in one of the dishes of the celestial scale; on the other, that fragment of wall, so well painted in yellow. He felt that, imprudently, he had given for former up for the latter. (But I wouldn¿t want to be, he told himself, the news of the day in the afternoon papers.) He repeated: `small yellow wall panel with a wing, small yellow wall panel.¿
The show was presented in two rooms. In one, two canaries flew from one side to the other. They came and went between two large yellow panels, in which, besides food, they found a place to stand, watch the place, occasionally sing, and launch off again. In their trajectory, carefully arranged throughout the gallery, there were Roldán¿s delicately made drawings, which formed, alongside some yellow and gray planes, compositions that in their wisdom made me think of Malevich. The drawings included in these constructions came from another that disassembled Vermeer¿s View of Delft into twenty planes, each detail minutely crafted. Extracted from the image, they acquired a purely abstract identity.
This unfolding of images throughout this gallery connected with the next, where we found several rolls of recording tape, some very tangled up, a video and a white box. Opening the latter, its yellow interior let out the song of a bird, Pitangus sulfuratus, also known as ¿Tyrant Flycatcher,¿ among other names. I immediately connected this to the canaries and to the drawings of small birds arranged throughout the other gallery; here was their song and their name, there their image.
On opening night, somebody asked me, ¿and what is this? What does it mean?¿ This question made me remember a text by Joseph Quetglas that speaks of modern art¿s right to resist such interrogations, its right not to ¿mean.¿ Each work is a presence that silently, in its own way, connects with the world, with its moment and place, and thus derives its meaning. Susan Sontag also advocated for a love-like, ¿erotic¿ approach to the materiality of the work of art, without the violence of meaning. Circunstancias allows one to just be there, ¿erotically¿ enjoying it without necessarily wondering about its meaning, yet its very materiality suggest that there is something to be unveiled. To that end, it is illuminating to learn a few things about the process of its composition.
This work emerged ¿under the shadow of Proust.¿ During his alleatory and disarmed reading, Roldán painted the yellow planes and little by little came to an encounter with the fragment cited, which he judiciously underscored. The yellow plane acquired great importance, and from there emerged the drawings and those beautiful constructions installed at Casas Riegner.
One of Proust¿s key topics is involuntary memory, that flash ignited by a haphazard stimulus that suddenly brings to mind a forgotten experience, an act of memory that differs from remembrance. Walter Benjamin said that our recovery of the past or its remaining forever in oblivion depend on chance. The Madeleine that randomly fell in Proust¿s cup of tea is what allowed for the recovery of is childhood, and the sound of a teaspoon and a slight trip over a raised tile produce that prodigious recovery of ¿lost time.¿ The Pitangus sulfuratus does the same in the case of Roldán, its song bringing to memory the patios of his native Cali, ¿filed with mangoes and samanes,¿ where the little bird is known as ¿bichojué.¿
According to Roldán, this work ¿is like an adventure that I wanted to make participatory for the viewer and which invites reflection with simple questions and complex answers about the scales of life.¿ This show allowed us to come and go in that adventure, while the canaries flew carrying at once Vermeer¿s yellow hue, the circumstances of Bergotte¿s death, and the sun rising over Cali¿s patios.

Marta Rodríguez
 


 

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