Tomás Espina

1. I think one of the works that most interests me at the moment, in which I believe I manage to achieve a synthesis of several obsessions, (yet without closing myself off,) is “una habitación enteramente quemada” (a room entirely burned,) floors and walls covered with soot illuminated only by a small 25W lamp. I believe that at the time my intention was to create a space violated by a fire or an explosion so that the spectator could witness the disaster upon entering. However upon completing their entrance, their sensation would be extremely pleasant. The total black produced by the soot caused a lost sense of space and it was like floating in the middle of a black hole. A factor that escaped my control was that some of the people that passed through the room would write and draw with their fingers on the soot of the walls. Love notes, spirals, insults, etc. Every day upon closing the CCEC, the guard for the room burned the walls again so that the next day they were completely black and the public could write on them anew. Upon completing the show and cleaning the soot off the walls of the room, all the graffiti appeared superimposed and intertwined. This work, which was meant to be the most synthetic and abstract that had been done yet, ended up being the most loaded and complex, full of all kinds of figurations. Finally, the intentional violence of the burned room, expansive and explosive violence, ended up transformed into another kind of violence, a kind that came from the outside in. A centripetal and collective violence.

I believe that my work, initially and circumstantially, has been misunderstood and classified within what is badly termed "political art" or art that has some "political intention" (I never believed in that class of denominations, neither political nor light nor polight). I am very far from that type of intention, and my initial intention is generally very far from the final result. I believe that what this series of works presents is questions that have more to do with problems of the image and its use. Some are images that have entered into the system of representation through the mass media, they are images installed, in some form or another, in the collective imaginary and on that point I believe that a direct relation exists between explosives as a means of representation and the selected images (I see a direct relation; media vs explosives). The problem presented to me by the use of those (established) images, was the issue of the material supplanting the representation, so I needed to twist the material and therefore, the image. That led to another problem, the fact is that I'm not interested in works that rely purely on their outward, material appearance. I believe the core of this a problem provides a way to read my work.

My formation was basically academic (school and workshops) and my strongest influences have always stemmed from the field of the image and, more precisely, from painting. My historical influences are infinitie, German painting from Friedrich to Oehlen, contemporary pop music, popular arts and crafts, the new figuration ¡GRECO! the neo vanguards. The question of the contemporary national scene is more complicated, I relate to the works of my contemporaries in another way, it's a kind of fatal attraction, a hobby and a passion for what is produced at present. I like to watch the processes of production, to participate in discussions, to know the artists and their anxieties within whatever artistic field or medium. Of course there are artists that interest me more than others but they don't necessarily fit within one or another current. I, for my part, enjoy a lot of very dissimilar works such as the painting of Fernanda Laguna or the work of Nicola Constantino, Pablo Siquier as well as Oscar Benedeccti (I’m a huge fan of his) or Fabián Burgos, I like Lamothe as much as Gómez Canle, Navarro as well as De Caro, Pereira or Masvernat, León or Gordin, Pruden or Gallardo….etc. There are also certain works outside of the production of artists that i like and that influence me.

I am also eclectic in my interests in the contemporary national scenes and shows, I have seen shows that seemed good for nothing but from which I could rescue one or two works or ideas and run with them. If I had to select two recent shows that were really meaningful for me, one would be the retrospective of Arthur Bispo do Rosario, in the Biennial of SP 2000. I believe I've never felt so vulnerable when facing someone's work, so small and insignificant. I saw the entire universe summarized in his work. From the most tremendous isolation, like a neuropsychiatric who has been despoiled of all and has agreed to recreate the history of humanity with a single objective, to present it to God at the moment of his death… The other show that I could say disturbed me was me the last Biennial of SP 2007. Not because I liked it or not, there was nothing there that fit my tastes, and I still don't really have the means to digest it; there was no space for hedonist pleasure there, all was pure agitated thought, a radical counterpoint with all the hyper-ultra-spectacular tendencies of the international contemporary art scene. This biennial postulated in an unpredictable manner questions that are very difficult to digest and that artists are always throwing around: For whom do we work?, What is work in art?, What is art? Who wants art? Why? Who's on my side? Do they serve what I do to deserve that side? There, to the side! This biennial redefined the place of the artist within a society and ran the risk of saying good-bye forever to the words "work of art" making room for the concept that the artist is not a creator, but a ‘possibilitator’, a messenger…

I believe that today the question of current aesthetics is debilitating for thinking about the relations of contemporary productions, because it is something that is constantly generated and regenerated. At present, I believe that the artists and the works are linked in another manner, without a mother root or a father trunk and this seems to me at the moment a much richer way of generating forms of critical thought within a community. On the other hand I have a strong sense, which is something very personal, that ultimately a growing external demand exists for that which is referred to as "contemporary art", and it's a demand for a product, a demand that fashions an artist to accord to precepts that are completely circumstantial and in response to market or institutional tendencies. Today, what is asked of a young artist is more than what they can give, I believe the professionalization of art students is detrimental to their capacity to create and to listen to their own inner demands (if they have them) and above all to think outside of prejudices and questions of the art circuit. A clear example of this is that in Argentina the most important cultural event is a gallery fair where, apart from a few and generally accidental exceptions, one only finds answers to market demands and no questions. And the only question that arises from this is: How do I recover now from this vacancy? Where is there something true? Where is that strange thing that appears sometimes and feeds this elusive and tenacious virus?.