An Obsession with the Image and Images of An Obsession
Jose Manuel Springer
The painting of Jesus Lugo may currently be considered one of the most intriguing expressions in the panorama of the mexican fine arts. This is due, in the first place, to his way of addressing the subjects that interest him: museums, wars, the water world, painting as a system of self-referential representation, vanity. In the second place, we find his particular style of conceiving the pictorial space as a tableau vivant, a baroque exhibition of dozens of figures that inhabit credible spaces. And in the third place, there is his taste for beauty, a strange, difficult beauty that combines adornment with substance and a considerable dose of keenness.
Jesus Lugo belongs to a generation of artists (born in the 1960’s) who have lived the upsurge of non-pictorial conceptual art, but in his particular case, he has achieved a maturity at the age of forty that enables him to see painting as a medium to pose problems, ask questions, and present a contemporary stance through painting. In the art scene, his point of view summarizes a history of ‘looking’ –as posed by the French scholar Regis Debray- that spans its development from the magic look derived from idols, through the esthetic gaze (the origin of art), finally to reach the economic gaze that leads to the world of the visual, where the mass media, virtual images, art and advertising commingle.
Through
his plastic proposal, Jesus Lugo conveys his awareness of the situation
of present-day art. It is an undoubtedly slippery situation, difficult
to apprehend, and it might be defined in general terms as a stance of
opposition to a univocal sense. Lugo adopts an anti-symbolic position
as a form of rejection and criticism of pure reason in modern painting.
The result is a painting that we might term “metaphysical”,
in as much as it seeks the roots of the pictorial and of the emergence
of the image as a conveyor of meaning in the Western world.
Weary of modernist rationalism, in which the artist has a direct and privileged knowledge of things, this painter has decided to elude presentation, elude the unique and original pictorial act to tread the path of re-presentation, in which everything that is painted has been previously sanctioned by art history, the critique and museums, but whose context has been “shifted”, disarranged and superimposed with other non-artistic referents.
In all these series it is possible to detect the author’s obsession with the accumulation of knowledge through images; the intermediary role of images as an oblique or indirect way of apprehending a world that is increasingly vast and increasingly populated by icons. In Lugo’s painting we can personally experience the apocalypse of meaning, where man has lost the sense of existence and seeks to regain it by surrounding himself with images that produce accumulative, yet not explicative aesthetics, as it may be seen in the series The Triumph of the School of Paris. The Triumph of the School of Paris I alludes to the Pyrrhic victory of French painting represented as a torn down architectonic structure in flames. The arid landscape provides the setting for the execution of a painter. The transition of academic painting extends to naturalism, and from there it leaps to an unredeemable version of the Pink Panther and Daffy Duck, which reveals the caustic way in which the author brings the history of painting to an end.
The fact that he addresses his themes in series speaks of the artist’s need to make a thorough attack on the already decayed paradigms of disciplinary knowledge, in order to propose a method of connected knowledge, namely, a knowledge acquired through ensembles linked through empirical ways that are not always logical.
In the universe of disappointment, disillusion and anguish (derived from the absence of meaning), we still find traces of the humanism that inspired the Renaissance; the criticism of the destructive power of technology that constituted the main motivation during the 19th and 20th centuries; and the denouncement of the cynicism of present-day advertising. However, it is Lugo’s obsessions, the reductio ad absurdum and the relativization of knowledge that he presents to us in his collages that induce us to think and strive to rediscover the value of science, religion and art, in order that we may find a transcendent meaning to our existence, a meaning that we need so badly.
