GALERIA DE LA OFICINA. MEDELLIN

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EL MÁGICO*

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The Mágico is the magician, the trick, and the victim all at once.  The Mágico is the device to move from one state of affairs to another.  However, neither the handkerchief nor the dove surprises us; it is the passage of mutation that actually shocks us and alerts us.   The Mágico achieves his fullness in the threshold, by definition foggy, between these two states of affairs, in his confusion, and this is where PABLO GÓMEZ situates his work.  Going back not only to the iconography of recent history but to its conceptual problems, the artist invents an operation of symbolic stripping, emptying, and trivialization of such an inventory of images and stories to move it to the present and the future, suspending it in the state of the Mágico.

Mobilization and transportation are not given just at the level of the images of the media that represent them; that is containers, airplanes, motorcycles, tractors, cars, etc., but through more complex procedures, such as the mobilization of the concept of appearance to the concept of sense and vice versa; the mobilization of the local to the international or the fictional mobilization of the artist himself to the referred – to historic scenery … and even more: the mobilization is manifested in the enlargement of the technical spectrum, belying the one voice of the Mágico: it multiplies not only the way of doing, but the way of telling, multiplying, then, the possible happening of a History that the artist commits himself to perpetuate, but the operating investment of common feelings of shame and embarrassment that has been sedimented in the last few years.  Shame and embarrassment that prevent the advance of a culture immobilized by its own history.

Between the color pencil and the miniature model wobbles the stability of Avión, his perception, his symbolic imposition: color and toy seek to recuperate the primordial banality of the object, appeasing its liberation, allowing it an eventual rebirth.  The creation of this instability is, in itself, a strategy to give another flow to the route defined by the rigidly installed myth.  But the myth, as understood by the artist, is the fiction of truth on the origin and, therefore, may be modified while it disseminates through the fields of popular memory.

The geography of the Mágico, is more a haziness that is defined as a space of scarce visibility between the beginning point and the “crowning” goal, as an interspace between blurred and elusive cartographies, of undefined and constantly changing routes, of topographies of summits in permanent ascent and accumulation.  In this haziness appears to inhabit a virus that destabilizes and decomposes the dominant bonds of the terms and the stories, m-a-c-r-o – c-o-s-m-i-c, s-i-m-u-l-a-t-e-d – a-p-p-e-a-r-a-n-c-e or e-f-f-i-c-i-e-n-c-y, are nothing but the first anagrams that arise from this anomalous operation, that profess the mobilization of sense toward the Mágico.  In the space of the plastic work of PABLO GÓMEZ, words and myths, sketches and figures, codes, and collective images are washed.

 

*Mágico: A popular term originating in the city of Medellín, Colombia, to describe a drug dealer.

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Esteban Restrepo Restrepo