For some time, Andy Warhol has conceded to us 15 minutes of fame. That being the case, the prerequisite was to have an accident, be poisoned…That tricky media worthy relevance would not spare Marilyn, Elvis or Mao. Their faces were sufficiently important to be worthy of being remembered, reworked and converted into a treasured object or icon for posterity.
Why is one life more important than another? Most Importantly, who is interested that we think this way?
Jorge Rodriguez Gerada started making art more that 15 years ago in New York City (he is a Cuban New Yorker, and that is not banal biographical information added to satisfy the curiosity of curators in search for the exotic or art professionals whose value scale is based on the passport).
We are before one of the founders of the artistic direction known as “Culture Jamming”.
But lets go to the artistic processes of the Identity series, one of the best examples of coherence in art in the last few years. Portraits in charcoal (gestures, sketches? – not in the least) people, until now anonymous, scale the walls of buildings in our cities, in a format that we can begin to describe as gigantic. Yes, they are gigantically defying, proud, dignified. More social than political, with the measure that the preoccupation for one ridicules the other.
Jorge finds his protagonists in the street, in the neighborhood where they live, where they are from or decided to stay. That they be residents is important. They are not an object troubé. Thus begins the true dialog. Mutual understanding, the reasons and the explinations. Then comes the final decision, which belongs to the local resident, to allow the work to be completed. But let us not be mistaken, the art piece is not the charcoal drawing. The artistic process begins with the search for the city, the building, and most importantly the person (who is sufficiently valiant to allow being found). Decide to be converted into a hero (like those of modernity described and defended by Baudelaire) monumental; a Goliath confronting the powerful King Davids of politics and advertising in order to take back the public space, snatched from our hands by advertisers anxious to sell us perfect men and women, and politicians that against all the evidence want to convince us that they are perfect.
Risk your own likeness, the gaze, the anonymous life, to reach a popularity that is not paid (this is not Big Brother, nor any of the other loathsome programs in which we hand over our miseries for money). And this entrusted to an artist. Let us not forget how many times artists have duped us and taken advantage of known imbeciles and the famous that are not worthy of being known (of course, later they say that it is a critique, or whatever allegation that they can find in the great Bible of aesthetics.
What defines identity, that fragile and inconsistent –but necessary- sensation of being? Its search is one of the most arduous tasks in life. I would say especially for an artist and particularly for Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada (I wont repeat his pertinent biographical information).
His achievements, his coherence and the grandeur of the humanity in his work, place him among the best artists of our generation. Fortunately, utilizing words which are not my own, but that I cannot resist using (I am sure that the person who wrote them will forgive me), his “Identities occupy the canvas of our cities, populating them with the marvelous residual essence of it people”.