Ser Argentino · Being Argentinean

Thru 27 April 2012

Quite a troublesome if not impossible definition to achieve by means of a discourse, except by establishing the national identity from an I.D. card, in which the photograph - analogical and glued before, now digital and never doing us any justice- would remit or “look like” the bearer of such identity associated to an own name. One’s own, precisely.

However.
Sergio Fasola’s images might perhaps become such improbable, almost impossible definition.
They might.
But not for such a space of the oral and written discourse. They might, if one accepts to play the game of thinking with the organ of vision. I know - we all do -that immediately (not immediately after, but at the same time) words come to complete, to “define”. Here is where the impossibility appears, not before. As we were watching (if such an isolated act were possible) we recognized something that can recognize ourselves.

But.
They are as from the very construction, as from the operative mechanism or as from the production mode they derive: the montage.
I said before that Fasola’s images remitted to vision. Now I add, the vision they require is both pictorial as it is cinematographic (as in a mute film where montage was fundamental).
Except that in this case, the whole film would be on the surface of a same image, in that rectangle which could hardly be called photography. In this sense it would also be justifiable to talk about collage.

And there appears the temptation to think of Fasola’s work in terms of the surreal, like encounters without a logical pertinence. Strictly speaking, I guess I mean surreal more in terms of Fellini than of surrealist painters
One could say that Fasola is ironical; humor is present in his work. But his images do not exhaust themselves in such reading. Quite the contrary, they keep on working, in various manners, on our visual organs - if we understand by them, those that include thought - they keep on thinking us after the acid laughter they arise.
Then.
The possibility which emerges- the one I referred to at the beginning- is not the only, univocal, definition (we are not in the field of the word and, no doubt, much less of a real word) but of a space of recognition which does not tell (us) but which recognizes us somewhere in that rectangle and invites us to think, not about the meaning but about the display, the evolution, the over-the-edge plurality that constitutes us, about that schizophrenia we are.

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