Has it really stopped? Pausa, the views of confinement

The pause is an essential element in any creative process; its presence builds rhythm and cadence. Patricia Conde Galería has taken this element into account in naming its most recent project. Pausa alludes to the intimacy of a parenthesis that is disruptive for all of us: the obligation to stand still with the aim of being a little more inaccessible in the face of an intangible threat.

Pausa is made up of work by all the artists that Patricia Conde represents. The gallery solicited an image from each artist in order to bring together a representative historical archive of this unprecedented moment, characterized by its unpredictable, hypnotic, and, at times, infamous cadence. In this way, a file was created of 28 pieces originating from archive reviews or from new images, based on views from confinement; a record that must coexist in history with accumulated accounts of diagnosed patients and passings.

“It amazes me to think and I still can’t understand that the whole world suddenly stopped,” said the gallerist during a presentation of the project during the first days of August. “Those artists who couldn’t go out on the streets to do their work made a review of their archives in order to find jewels that can now have another reading. In that way everything was conditioned by the pandemic. Each one of them preserved their expression in photography. If we know them, even just a little, we realize whose photograph it is that we are seeing.”

For the image titled ¿Sin vuelo posible? (“No Flight Possible?"), Cristina Kahlo placed a miniature human reproduction inside a birdcage; she wanted to capture the collective sensation regarding the physical impossibility of taking flight, and, at the same time, to demonstrate that there are no possible confinements for thought.

In Las alas de la vida (“The Wings of Life”), César Ordoñez has portrayed the shadow of a pair of gloves projected onto paving stones. The composition invites us to speculate on what holds up the objects, as they seem to fly above the photographer, like two scapulars that have found a way to emancipate themselves from the thorax. At the same time, the piece invites us to think about what gloves symbolize at a moment in which touch is not what it once was.

Adam Wiseman chose the image Lejos de México, encima del Tesco Express, la cuarentena la comparte con su novio. Cerca de la Universidad Goldsmiths, Londres (“Far from Mexico, on top of the Tesco Express, the quarantine is shared with her boyfriend. Near Goldsmiths, University of London”), a visual narrative about voyeurism as an ally of confinement. The artist photographed the facade of an apartment building in the English capital. In it one can see, for the most part, closed windows and lights turned-off, except for one window, where a couple looks out from their shelter. They’re the only ones there, but it seems as though all of us are projected onto their faces, looking out from the window frame onto the scene of a life that is as much a few steps away as it is far.

Patricia Lagarde has proposed La mesa puesta (“The Set Table”) as a paraphrase of the homonymous image by the French lithographer Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. We see an arrangement, in the manner of a still life, with common elements: a plate, a couple of glasses, two pieces of cutlery, jar, and vase. For Lagarde, the table and its objects condense encounter, affects, intimacy, and solitude; they integrate a central point of the human being, regardless of latitude. It’s at the table that the home takes on new dimensions and it’s the table that inhabits us: the fundamental vehicle of confinement, of ritual, whether shared or desolate.

Twenty copies of each image have been printed on cotton paper, as well as a version for the gallery and one for the author. The file will be destroyed so that it can’t be printed again. Each piece is available for sale at a price of seven thousand pesos. As part of the project, virtual presentations are offered every two weeks with the participation of four artists who explain the origins of their proposals; these presentations can be viewed on Zoom (for more information please write to info@patriciacondegaleria.com).

Finally, each work is different from both the previous one and the next, though it also forms a composition of what transgresses all of us by equal measure. With no specific date scheduled for its completion, the project is scheduled to last four months, during which each artist will be able to present their work. Nevertheless, the pieces are already on sale through the page patriciaconde.online.

Artists: Cynthia Araf, Cannon Bernáldez, Alejandro Cartagena, Belinda Garen, Alexandra Germán, Javier Hinojosa, Cristina Kahlo, Patricia Lagarde, Moisés Levy, José Antonio Martínez, Francisco Mata Rosas, César Ordóñez, Dulce Pinzón, Ilán Rabchinskey, Humberto Ríos, Patricio Robles Gil, Oswaldo Ruiz, Adam Wiseman, Renate Aller, George Nobechi, Paola Dávila, Olin Heitmann, Sofía Ayarzagoitia, Laura Cohen, Juan Carlos Coppel, Mariela Sancari

Translated by Byron Davies