Losing Misfortune: On "El otro protagonista de la noche" by Enrique López Llamas

Y es verdad soy un payaso Pero, ¿qué le voy a hacer? Uno no es lo que quiere Sino lo que puede ser.

—José José

At LLANO Gallery, you move through the space in a circle. Paintings and sculptures line the walls, many of them small images of cigarettes and books accompanying the journey. At the center, a sculpture of a man offers his rear to the air, a narcissus flower stuck in him. Music plays in the background, instrumental versions of various songs, rotating on repeat. The sculpture floats on concrete, appearing to either sink or transform into a flower. Once again, a lake appears, but this time, no reflection is seen.

At the far end, a video plays. It consists of scenes, moments, and sketches from a revue theater where the protagonist falls, hits himself, forces vomiting, chokes, or reverses his actions. Some of the moments are rewound simply for the pleasure of watching destruction undone. Everything moves back and forth, is thrown down and picked up.

In the middle of colorful or dark spaces, we see the flow of scenes that make up this theater of failure, akin to a YouTube compilation, MTV hits, or Jackass. If we stick with it long enough, we can count them: there are sixteen scenes, each with its own title. The video starts and ends in a loop of moments, a flow that feels like a circle—perhaps like the anus that encircles the world.

In every scene, the other protagonist rehearses and loses. He loses the solemnity of masculine tragedy. He loses the illusion of biographical melorealism. He rehearses adulthood in a belated coming-of-age and discovers his erotic potential. What do we make of this theater of falling, of 2000s slapstick, of millennial nostalgia? What do we do after we fall? We tell our misfortune to our friends and accept the shame.

"Darkness is finding a way to laugh about being on fire" —Written on a fake notebook sculpture in Enrique López Llamas' artistic process.

In the video, every scene feels staged; some colors suggest an extremely well-curated high-definition environment. It avoids disorder, instead structuring the world like the scene Scape.g.o.a.t., where a rewound figure neatly arranges a stack of black and white socks. Everything happens as a surprise in the video—much like the cinema of attractions[1]—and the paintings and sculptures in the gallery slowly reveal themselves as props, references, or set pieces.

The circularity or repetition seems to cause one fragment to respond to others, like in Thrist: a red liquid spills on the protagonist, who dresses as a vampire. Or in Red, the most intense scene, where he self-induces bright red vomiting, which matches the background. Everything loops in a circle like a revue theater, circus, or fair.

What’s funny about other people's failures? Watching their night, their vices, or their rigidity. "... The comedian’s art is to make us know this vice so well, to introduce us so intimately, that we end up glimpsing the strings of his puppet."[2] The other protagonist’s rigidity seems like that of perfect calculation. The function of humor in this era responds to modern subjectivity, where we seem less like bodies and more like machines for reproduction, sequences of images, machines producing sad machines.

In our world, it’s impossible to be transparent. All identities are mediated by one’s self-design, presented as a work of art[3]. This is why the curatorship, led by Gaby Cepeda, strives to make sense of this pose—to give order to complacency and shame, to hyperbolic authenticity, to the desire always to appear perfect before external eyes, to feel and live the most beautiful things, to be always good, kind, and useful. It explores a public use of this hypercritical gaze that defines our contemporary practice.

Laughter requires an audience. The clown cannot laugh at himself. He seeks an external gaze that allows him to express his vice as a mechanical, elastic character; as a being of tension, at odds with nature. The comic character knows he is being used by others. He projects a kind of agency to the audience through his image, and that is his power.

"It’s not a phase, Mom" —Tattoo-inscription on a sculpture of an arm, mimicking the circle game with a crystal encrusted glove.

Other people's failures don’t just make us laugh; they intrigue us. We wear the mask of pity, guilt, or empathy, but in truth, something about other people’s misery ignites this avalanche of feelings. A good friend, a curator-friend, is the one who allows us to laugh at this unending pain, discovering its potentials, redefining its ideals, and making the body flow. I heard that the exhibition’s process was the result of a months-long creative dialogue between Enrique and Gaby—a friendly curatorial ping-pong turned into a work excuse. How can we enhance an art of dialogue, of revelry, of delirium, of kicking, of falling, without falling into misery ourselves? We laugh and laugh at ourselves, in a failed dandy style—or is that already too millennial?

To lose and fall, and fall and lose, and write (hopefully more) with crap[4]. This video performance turned into popular theater is also the chance to watch alongside others. In the middle of the room, several spectators gather to watch the video, coming in and out, staying to observe. Enrique told me he liked seeing the back of people’s heads. What is the joy that arises when others see the failure of the self on screen?

If this retro-maniacal digital practice is so effective and affective, how do we hack the algorithmic sensibility that captures it? Where do we go after we fall? Who can fall and rise again? How do we quit smoking[5]? El otro protagonista de la noche [The Other Protagonist of the Night] reminded me of this other night poem:

Autopsychography

The poet is a man who feigns
And feigns so thoroughly, at last
He manages to feign as pain

The pain he really feels,
And those who read what once he wrote
Feel clearly, in the pain they read,
Neither of the pains he felt,
Only a pain they cannot sense.

And thus, around its jolting track
There runs, to keep our reason busy,
The circling clockwork train of ours
That men agree to call a heart.

Fernando Pessoa

— Andrés Ardila

Translated to English by Luis Sokol

[1] “The cinema of attractions directly demands the viewer’s attention, stirring visual curiosity and providing pleasure through an exciting spectacle: a unique event, fictional or documentary, that is of interest in itself.” Tom Guning. "The cinema of attraction[s]: Early film, its spectator and the avant-garde." Theater and Film: A Comparative Anthology 39. 1986.

[2] Henri Bergson. La risa. Lectorum. 2019.

[3] Boris Groys. Devenir obra de arte. Caja Negra Ediciones. 2023

[4] “He served no belief or ideal, he did not write with blood, but with crap,” quotes and critiques Octavio Paz, writer Luis Felipe Fabre in his essay on Salvador Novo. Escribir con caca. Editorial Sexto Piso. 2017

[5] Remembering the beautiful song by Nicolas y los fumadores https://youtu.be/UQpVDMU_yj8?si=K-ueS-yOPydGi6MR