Jesús Moreno
Galería La Cuadra, Caracas, Venezuela. 2013
Exhibition awarded by AICA Venezuelan Chapter as "Emerging Artist" 2013.
Exhibition text - Miguel Miguel (Curator)
Jesús Moreno´s artistic work involves a multiplicity of resources within an investigation whose central axis is space conceived as the integrity of the tangible and the intangible. From this starting point, he reflects on the relationships between subject, object, and environment, and the implications of the modes of interaction of contemporary beings with their surroundings. His work reveals utopian spaces, spatial poems, and artifacts of dubious operability that question the density of the medium in which they operate, generating a unique universe that showcases the problems of the subject immersed in a congested environment. In this environment, poetry, listening, and an aesthetic of simplicity redeem him from audiovisual chaos, seeking in the tangle of noises that constitute his surroundings a reconnection with the essential aspects of the human condition.
The current exhibition at Galería La Cuadra, titled after the artist; It includes a group of works developed by him between 2011 and 2012, where we appreciate various aspects of a growing plastic language that expose his approach with strength, simplicity and elegance, and invites us to see a specific focus of the national artistic scene through the work of this young artist.
Artists´s reflexive text - On sound, objects and space (2011/12)
This proposal stems from reflecting on our relationship with space, where I am fundamentally interested in three things: landscape, subject, and object. These issues, while complex and profound in themselves, are in this case elements of an articulated system understood as a fluid process whose margins remain open. They are approached as components of that living organism that is space. But why landscape, subject, and object? I believe that the intrinsic relationships woven between these elements are what most accurately approximate a definition of how I understand space. Therefore, the modules are a formal resolution to this approach, shaping the perception of and interaction with the environment by considering these three axes as elements of a set of principles, a constantly flowing process whose continuity is given by the dialogue between them. This idea of continuity, approached by considering the flow that arises from this conversation between landscape, subject, and object, emerges as a response to the fragmented view of urban space, where a set of interconnected parts and pieces systematically respond to a specific function, similar to the operation of an industrial assembly line.
From this perspective, the methodology of working with sound has become a way of perceiving the city by understanding these “fragments” as specific elements that, when appropriately isolated, can be manipulated separately as materials offering discursive possibilities similar to the characters of an alphabet: These materials* are themselves particles with a content derived from the interaction between landscape, object, and subject; an interaction where their intrinsic meaning is constituted; selected from the environment like words of language to compose a poem.
Likewise, the work with sound raises issues that, when applied to the context of the proposal, have been incorporated into the conception and production process of the most recent works. The concepts of “Filter,” “Distortion,” and “Modulation” have migrated from a technical and musical context to a visual arts context, where they become variables within a system with given patterns.
The ideas of “Noise,” “Silence,” and “Amplitude” come from the context of manipulating sound to become focal points in the question of landscape. It is worth noting here the central role of the medium of interaction with space in the innovation of how space is conceived, a question that reflects on the contemporary imaginary from the perspective that space, conceived as an open concept, can or cannot be delimited, expanded, or synthesized.
At this point, the question of space as an “open concept” should be approached from the perspective of a space of freedom that is constructed as a process of individuation involving the subject, their context, and the objects present within it. Emphasis is placed on the interaction between these elements as a catalyst for that space—a process that functions in close similarity to language, where the user chooses words from a universally accessible pool to construct a discourse subordinate to grammatical rules. In the context of space, these rules are determined by the user, who imbues them with subjective content by selecting and ordering them in a specific way.
Returning to the formal aspect of the proposal, the modules are conceived with the intention of writing about the city, perceiving it through sonic sensitivity, understood in this case as a methodological and operational approach rather than as a means of expression. They are spatial poems that reflect the interactions of landscape, subject, and context, evoking situations, operations, and functions involving these three elements of space. They denote their tangible and intangible aspects to reflect on the idea of habitability, mobility, and continuity. In this line of thought, these modules, presented as artifacts of dubious functionality, utopian spaces, or vehicles that question the density of the medium in which they move, invite the viewer to a creative exercise that, from a subjective point of view, reconsiders space and reflects on its relationship to the viewer in order to elucidate to what extent space is habitable, whether it expands or contracts, or whether it is simply a perceptual and subjective construction given in the unity of that which is accessible through the senses and what is appreciated in it subjectively and individually.
