Jorge Restrepo: Multiple Approaches for Just One Doing

 

As of 2004 in works such as “Emilio’s Puzzle,” “The Assembly Line in Galeras” or a little farther on in “Carpet,” the painting so meticulously treated by Jorge Restrepo becomes just another resource for conveying his new concerns; ideas have arisen that go beyond what is strictly pictorial.

 

It is in recent years that Jorge Restrepo’s work has been opening up spontaneously to new thematic and expressive possibilities. The artist has concluded at this point that the handling of the colors and the shapes within the rectangle of the painting no longer fully satisfies his incursions into the field of the creative and that the installation, the performance actions and collective art can reach new and unforeseeable nuances.

 

Little by little, new ideas crop up in this Colombian’s realizations: the work’s critical looks; a painting that evades the traditional mountings and leaves the museum; works that transgress the classic author-work-public triangulation; reliefs that privilege the touch over the visual; abstractions covered with mantles that bring us closer to the topic of the erotic.

 

If for the Greeks art was, to a great extent, doing something…for Restrepo such a formulation is also valid; doing is what gives him the possibility of finding new approaches. And it is undoubtedly in those multiple approaches to one same way of doing something, where the esthetics of his work is anchored.

 

Two critical looks at his work

 

With “The  Assembly Line in Galeras” (1), Jorge Restrepo places on stage the issue of the Central American assembly line, a resource for obtaining cheap labor, to which the large businesses resort. In this form of work, former artisans or craftsmen are replaced by the "machine operator”: an inexpert, little qualified worker that learns certain work formulas and who reproduces repetitively the little that he is taught to do….”...an objectively less expensive worker ….”(2)…. just another piece in the cog.

 

Thus it was that in November 2004, in Galeras, a locale distant from Tegucigalpa, formed by rural peasants from the region (3), a work group was organized in order to produce a painting on a large bolt of cloth. Earlier, Jorge Restrepo had made the design inspired in Guatemalan Indian motifs. Each of the women repeated the initial sketch executed by Restrepo along the cloth laid out on the ground, which served as a way of opening up on-line work.

 

Section by section, there is a border of rich color; the group joins forces and acts like a gigantic roller that stamps the cloth. The confluence of different qualities and skills in the use of hands means that the canvas has certain imperfections that Restrepo has qualified as resources that embellish the work and give it a climate of rusticity.

 

But, in any case, Jorge Restrepo not only seeks to simulate the “assembly line”; he also surpasses that level. The artist teaches his operators how they should paint the cloth; he teaches them the trade of painting. As they advance in their task, the women certainly go from the category of being “unskilled” to qualified workers.

 

Although “The Assembly Line in Galeras” has been conveniently documented with photos, the painting is still unknown. But this type of collective work has served the Colombian to position himself for the first time within the theme of work, from a perspective not generally followed, from where the exploitation and the lack of social justice are patently inevitable.

 

In “The Farmers’ Market” (4), a later work, Jorge Restrepo planned to set up an ‘installation’ in a large, open-air market in Tegucigalpa and thereby take art to the street, getting it out of the context of the museums and the galleries, taking it to a public space. To do that, he had to change his work strategy by painting on the cloth that forms part of the sales stands; he had to transform it for that installation into something suitable for the market space…adopt a narrower format. He does not recur to the usual ranges; he rubs the surface of the works and generates ‘worn-away’ areas.

 

In “The Farmers’ Market,” Restrepo not only deals with the idea of public art. In this installation, such as occurred earlier in “The Assembly Line in Galeras,” he also establishes a profound critical look at work.

 

In “The Farmers’ Market,” Restrepo’s works shared the market with edible products displayed for sale. Although said products differ from a work of art in many aspects, in the whole of his works exhibited within the ‘installation-market,’ they constitute a ‘package’ of potential productive forces.

 

In such a setting Restrepo was one worker more, a merchant who takes his products to the market outside the scope of the gallery or the museum. Under the influx of this action, the Colombian artist reminds us that his work is ineludibly merchandise. The old idea of a plastic artist that “works for a wage” flows, who, in order to make his merchandise, engages in “dirty work with materials that stain...” (5). This is how the creator of “The Farmers’ Market” leads us with a critical look toward possible reflections about the issue of the artist and his work.  

 

The work leaves the museum

 

Until “Emilio’s Puzzle” (6), Jorge Restrepo had resorted almost exclusively to an esthetic determined by the rescue of some elements of the neoplasticist syntax and certain authorities that linked him inevitably to a painting marked by perception. But in this work he appears to break with the old paradigm of his painting; he opens his eyes to new approaches.

 

Restrepo places the work on the floor and changes the public’s angle of vision. He also offers the possibility of “playing” with it; of making a large puzzle based on the theme of biotechnology….” Each work represented a gel used in biotechnology to visualize the bars formed by the genes in the molecular studies” (7).  The public could put together the puzzle, placing the pieces in order or making new shapes, creating variations.

 

For Restrepo, “Emilio’s Puzzle” is the valid argument for expressing a great metaphor about science and technology and their possible links with ethics…an issue that will be addressed again in “Biotechnology and Morals,“ (8) a realization of collective art. The ‘puzzle’ is not only a great metaphor; but it is also, from a strictly plastic standpoint, the resource that permits him to depart from the painting on an easel and the traditional hanging within an art gallery. After this work, Jorge Restrepo will discover, almost spontaneously the successive steps that distance him from the painting of other periods.

 

With “The Farmers’ Market” he will cover the next step…..taking the painting to the market; in short, he converts it into an object of ‘street’ art and gives us to understand that a work can have a variety of destinations. “Carpet” (9) will give the definitive ‘twist’ to the issue by exposing the ephemeral and vulnerable nature of certain works.

 

“Carpet” responds to the characteristics of a ‘public intervention.’  Restrepo starts from an old tradition of the Central American countries, where each family makes carpets of dyed sawdust or flower petals in the street for the processions to pass over during Holy Week. This practice is closely linked to propitiation and rogation.

 

The work in question was similar to a floor made of a large Venetian mosaic, placed in the middle of the roadway and held by the artist and 14 young artists who worked from Restrepo’s original design, adding some variables in the mixture of color and use of molds, which enriched the work. The participants who pass by in the religious ceremony ‘intervene’ in the work…the soles of their footwear drag the materials that formed it, thereby initiating the road to its destruction…. “The Museum went out to the street (it had already gone to the market), it threw itself to the ground, to be knocked around by the fervor of the believers (10). Such disintegration of the body of the work generates the sensation that the artist had a clear intention of favoring an idea over the material resources …of heading more clearly toward the conceptual.

 

Meticulously, Restrepo recorded “Carpet” photographically?both the process of its realization and its destruction by the procession of faithful believers. He documents the different stages because he knows that this street realization is ephemeral… that it is the medium that permits him to take his work outside the Museum, so he needs to leave a testimony of that circumstance.

 

Intellectuals, touch and sensuality

 

After the experiences of “The Farmers’ Market” and “Carpet,” it is quite clear that Restrepo has adopted the practice of public art. Nonetheless, in other works he returns to the galleries and the museums, surely to avoid limiting himself. Then he will put on a show, individually or collectively, with works such as “Decoration for an Intellectual with Leftist Tendencies,” “Beyond the Tangible” and “Visual Arts?”

 

In “Decoration for an Intellectual with Leftist Tendencies” (11), the Colombian puts together a scene at the Fordisso Café in Tegucigalpa (12)….two customers seated, conversing at a table. In the background is a painting that Restrepo did especially for the occasion, painted on an old  canvas picked up off the street….another canvas is on the floor under the table, simulating a carpet, only one element that gives atmosphere to the scene while giving it a certain significance.

 

“Decoration for an Intellectual with Leftist Tendencies” is a work that alters the classic triangulation author-work-public. If it is the customers who, when they take their seats, form part of the work without even trying to, they are establishing a new relationship: author-decoration-customer-public.  This is how a part of the public (those who sit in the chairs) becomes actors within the context of the work (13).

  

As of “Emilio’s Puzzle,” Jorge Restrepo has given the public permission to touch his work….a highly unusual circumstance within the museum setting. An issue that takes the center of the stage around 2005 when the artist produced “Beyond the Tangible” (14), a sample composed of whites and abstract reliefs. We should bear in mind that decades before that, except for some artists from Di Tella (15) in Buenos Aires (who exhibited productions such as “Have a tumble and live it up,” a covered construction with mattresses that incited the public to play with them), none dared consider the circumstance of touching the works.

 

Restrepo’s reliefs in “Beyond the Tangible” were intended to be ‘read’ by touch. If we consider it from the perspective of cognition, we should consider them to be “esthetic symbols,” to the extent that they explore the full and expressive properties of the resource employed for shaping them.

 

Perhaps under that cognitive lens we can find the answer to the artist’s statement: more than reliefs, they are esthetic symbols that need to be interpreted by the public. Immovable, almost expectant, Restrepo’s white reliefs need to be traveled tangibly to reveal something beyond the mere materiality of things.  

 

“Visual Arts?” (16) is part of “Semantics,” a collective exhibition held in Spain, in which he reformulates the statement of the abstract reliefs that he now presents “covered with mantles…the public can put their hands in a “sleeve” and feel the experience of finding what is inside…” (17). With “Visual Arts?” Restrepo discovers that the issue of the tangible has led him to gestate works linked to an esthetics of sensuality.

 

The photographic records of the exhibition are our clearest referent in this regard…white walls, a focalized light that activates the game of lights and shadows. The curator of Semantics, Jaime Rodríguez, has favored the work of Restrepo, by arranging things so that everything leads one’s eyes to the angle of the salon, where the three reliefs covered by the mantles are found; where their cloth generates a rhythmic game of curves. There is a certain climate of mystery at the scene; and one intuits that if one participates directly in it, one will feel moved to explore under the fabrics…almost like profaning the intimacy of the white reliefs.

 

 

Jorge Jofre

 

Buenos Aires, 15 August 2007

 

References and comments

 

1) “The Assembly line in Galeras.” Galeras, Morocelí, FM, Honduras. Documented by Donaldo Altamirano. 27/11/04.

2) Coriat, Benjamín, “The Workshop and the chronometer,” 1979, p. 31.

3) “I hired the women under a fair market contract (if the cloth is sold some day, they and their community will receive part of the money raised). The contracts form part of the work…,” Jorge Jofre, “Questions to Jorge Restrepo,” virtual interview, 30/7/2007.

4)  “The Farmers’ Market.” Museum of the Honduran Man and the Embassy of Colombia. Curator: Carlos Lanza. Tegucigalpa, 23-24/11/2005.

5) Hauser, Arnold, “Social History of Literature and Art”; for more information, see Chapter, “Poets and artists of old.”

6) “Emilio’s Puzzle.” Anthology of the Plastic and Visual Arts of Honduras, “Ricardo Aguilar.” National Art Gallery, Tegucigalpa, Honduras. 11/11 to 15/12/2004.

7)  “Questions to Jorge Restrepo,” op. cit.

8) “Biotechnology and Morals.” Center of Design and Architecture, CEDAC. 2005.

9) “Carpet,” Public Intervention. Museum of the Honduran Man and Office of the Mayor of Tegucigalpa, Honduras. 14/4/2006.

10) ” Questions to Restrepo,” op.  cit.

11) “Take one,” Fordisso Café-Gallery. Tegucigalpa, Honduras. 26/1 to 9/2/07.

12) “This has been the café of the intellectual class here in Tegucigalpa…a place where the best movies are presented and discussed. Where the best poetry is read and where some of our artists sometimes show some of their works,” “Questions to Restrepo,” op. cit.

13) “Having people sitting there, they became part of the work but they didn’t know that,” “Questions to Restrepo,” op. cit.

14) “Beyond the Tangible,” Exhibition of paintings dedicated to the nonseeing. French Alliance in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. 28/7 to 4/8/2005. The exhibition was taken to other countries.

15) The Instituto Di Tella (1958-1971) was key in the Argentine culture of the 60s. From 1963-1968 there were happenings; performances; displays of objects and notable examples of conceptual art. The Di Tella, influenced artists from other regions of the world.

16) “ Semantics,” Center of Modern Art, Duró House, Asturias, Spain, 28/9 to 26/10/07.

17) “Questions to Restrepo,” op. cit.

 

 

 

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