A visual artist with a recognized trajectory, whose working processes extend through time, as does the character he works with, ‘Egolactante’. Drawing, the word, action, video and published material are spaces where his questioning of the clichés that the construction of the subject draws on takes place. No todo tanto, his latest book, is also an act, a performance, a published work that acts.
In ‘No Todo Tanto’, as in other works of yours, I find a sort of nostalgia for existence and an order which never comes about, but has become absence. I also see an interest in ordering its remains with the present, with an intentional use of absurd ways of working, artist strategies. Not all that much (‘No todo tanto’), Gustavo. Non-regressive uses of melancholy are an option, but the drawings in the book set the conditions for publishing; each one of them set them both for me and for Lavinia, the graphic designer. There are no ordered presents. This is a book which holds fictions and libertarian drawings, the absurd is a mode of patheticism; in this book the drawings forbid all of that.
Masculine space, its intellectual authority, the social contract, authorship... are all questioned in your book, but aren’t dissected using feminist or queer theories, but from a fragile, genderless subject. These drawings don’t practise either masculine or feminine, they themselves hadn’t thought of it. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but they aren’t subjects, or fragile either – they’re drawings, demons and fantasies, sometimes nice people, but always strange.
Drawing and the word in a continuous text are the basic elements in your work. Drawing acquires a representative responsability which goes beyond the visible; you give it obligations and historical responsabilities, sometimes extreme ones... In the book, the drawings organise themselves to live between the lines and really enjoy themselves; in other instances they’re victims of (humanpharmaceutical) diagnoses. They’re made using pencil lead or a scanner, and exterminate each other with erasers; they aren’t so different to us but are more fun: they hate melodrama, the drawings I make systematically de-dramatize each minute of their lines.
[Gustavo Marrone]
More info about the book
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