La vida como trauma de la naturaleza [Life as a trauma of nature]

There is an image at once sublime and unbearable, an image on the edge of the enclosure that the morally unacceptable imposes. It is one of those that arose within that pure mental phantasmagoria which had the historical effrontery to become a true event projected, in real time, onto the retinas of the planet. In it, classical serenity prevails over the tragedy of the more real than real: a man descends against an immensely, endlessly vertical geometric background, buffeted by the wind of his own fall towards death. His silhouette, frozen in the photographic instant, somehow summons timeless beauty in the face of horror. He was one of the men who threw themselves into the void from the Twin Towers. I could not stop that vision from bursting into my mind as I contemplated Carlos Suárez’s works for this exhibition. In these photographs too, the figures appear tiny and solitary before a raw, brutal space. Here, however, these human presences appear lost, on the point of realising their tragic situation, on the point of a stifled, unheard terribilità, still in an everyday social attitude, in everyday clothes. The exhibition is entitled Paraísos Artificiales, like the well-known book Baudelaire devoted to his narcotic experiences. What these landscapes of pure contrast between the human figure and a dehumanised setting have of paradise lies in their symbolisation, their exorcism of an existential solitude, a psychic reduction to representation. The author’s defence of the space of his creations as a “paradise”, as “his world”, “his country”, may well express not so much a complacency with the beauty of his creations as a dependence on the imaginary. That these inhospitable places should be claimed in this way implies an idea of Eden quite different from everyone else’s, which can only be interpreted as the vindication of a solitude that allows the individualisation of the self, accepting its disorders. Not for nothing has much of the action of artists over the last two hundred years been a defence of the individual against the mass which, as Ortega said, has taken centre stage. Baudelaire himself, at the head of that extravagance known as dandyism, entered the artificial paradises of narcotics in order to perceive the world differently. However, I believe that in Carlos Suárez’s maturity these scenographies are moving towards the terrifying. That individualisation strips the world of everything — perhaps leaving only the light and the cave shadows of Plato — in order to place us, surely, before the question of death. Blanchot says: “We approach death, being that to which we are not accustomed, either as the unusual that amazes or as the unfamiliar that horrifies.” Ultimately, the figures in this open-air cave are surprised by nothingness, dressed as postmodern citizens. These landscapes, halfway between the biological and the glacial, between gigantic architecture and the abyss of the non-place, have a metaphysical lineage. The figures end up being more unsettling than the coldness that surrounds them. So much so that it feels as though they were, in the end, the ones holding up the scene, rather than the icy walls holding them. It seems that what is superfluous is not the setting, harsh and oppressive, but the figures, staging what Freud said about life as a trauma of nature.

Paraísos Artificiales. Carlos Suárez. Galería Vértice (Sala 0), 13 March – 19 April 2008, Oviedo