Curated by Fernando Gómez de la Cuesta.
Miss Mc Queen, 2020
Here, deconstructed.
Archeologies of the future
There is nothing like looking back to predict what is yet to come, a kind of constant premonition that, since the onset of history, has been issuing clues, symptoms, indications of this dystopian present in which we are now immersed for a long time. Everything has a cause and, of course, an effect. It results quite simple, in the moments that we are living, to put on the disguise of doomsayers and say that we already knew it, that we had been warning for a long time that all this could happen, that the signs were clear, that we did not want to listen to them, that we are selfish irresponsible that we only look for our own short-term benefit. Perhaps it is true, perhaps that is what we have been, that is what we are, and if we can continue to be something, that is what we will be.
César Santamaría is an artist who has been engaged in a meticulous task for a long time, in an archaeological collection of all those technological waste that leaves a sample of our journey, a kind of watchmaker housed in a unique time machine that allows him to come and go. In this anthropological search for the trace, for the rest, for the waste, he composes his sculptures, his symbolic icons, his exorcizing totems, like a convoluted techno-shaman that assembles contemporary remains that he has carefully selected. These totems become modern altars of everything that we must value, reliquaries of what is worth preserving, but also monuments in memory of those events in which we must not repeat, of those acts that, for the good of the life and nature, we should not commit again.
The coordinates that embody the creation of Santamaría undoubtedly belong to that ecological conscience and that ethical search that we comment on. Some ways of doing that start from his own experience, from his knowledge as an electronic engineer and from his humanist sensibility, to be formally linked to the Duchampian ready-made and all those surrealist methods -objet trouvé, collage, assemblage- that he practices with an aesthetic bizarre, techno-baroque, unprejudiced and uninhibited. Santamaría does not renounce the futuristic appearance to warn, precisely, about the dangers of the contemporary machinist maelstrom, about the self-absorption and excess that cybernetic excess causes, developing works that connect, from admiration, with the robotic and anthropomorphic constructions of Nam June Paik, a pioneering artist who also assumes the use of light, movement and sound, to generate a sculptural ensemble of singular retro-technological beauty.
As we have pointed out, César Santamaría's pieces appeal to waste, to discarded materials with a poor appearance that, on some occasions, remind us of the sculptures with recycled and assembled elements by Wolf Vostell, to the playful desacralization of the artistic object of the Fluxus movement. Santamaría collects integrated circuits and microchips, televisions and radio receivers, computers and calculators, musical instruments, clothes and their accessories, to express their concerns: speed, cars, design, fashion, the trademark system, aesthetics of classic electronic devices, political news, environmental claims or his fascination with scientific and technological advances. He also assumes and expresses his own life events, those that have taken him from one side of the ocean to the other, his contact with the Anglo-Saxon world, his virtual presence on the Internet and social networks or the management of that dichotomy, which we all suffer, between the light and darkness, between good and evil, currents of force that end up shaping this sacred field of “Totems”, this sculpture exhibition that is now being presented at the CARRASCO gallery in Madrid.
Fernando Gómez de la Cuesta
Atlántica, 2020
Mixed media, assembled through object trouvé, collage and assemblage techniques. 128 x 30 x 11 cm
CocoVader, 2020
Mixed media, assembled through object trouvé, collage and assemblage techniques. 196 x 44 x 28 cm
Perro policía, 2020
Mixed media, assembled through object trouvé, collage and assemblage techniques. 52 x 72 x 9 cm
AR-15, 2020
Mixed media, assembled through object trouvé, collage and assemblage techniques. 42 x 130 x 9 cm
Brexit, 2020
Mixed media, assembled through object trouvé, collage and assemblage techniques. 145 x 35 x 11 cm
A sales percentage of artworks on sale from César Santamaría TOTEMS exhibition, goes to helpless children through donation to the TIERRA DE HOMBRES Foundation:
