Rodrigo Alonso
For many years now, Viviana Zargón has used photography to construct her pictorial universe. Wide open spaces fill her works with a detailed precision that mere memory is incapable of providing. For this, she relies on photorealism: she voluntarily adopts the perspective of the camera (with all of its implications associated with the visual and semantic configuration of reality) yet opts to embody it through the techniques and materialities of painting.
This procedure allows her to approach industrial buildings (currently her main interest) with great precision and an emphasis on the rationalist structures that sustain them, their monumental scale and the rigor of their structural solutions. However, it also enables her to explore the concept of representation itself given that, although painting and photography both produce images, they do not capture reality in the same way. The choice of motifs also alludes to another, equally important type of depiction. For a long time, factories were the cornerstone of modern capitalism, both in terms of spaces for the controlled organization of the labor force and of the production of goods destined to meet the material needs of humanity.
Zargón shows us these empty, uninhabited spaces. Their enormous skeletons put into sharp relief the economic and social collapse of the modernist dream. From an archeological perspective, the artist explores their symbolism and corners to invite us to reflect on their unfulfilled promises as well as on the fate of production and labor today. One of these buildings, the Palais des Machines, was created for the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris to demonstrate the global importance of French industrial power. It embodies the utopia of the beginnings of industrial capitalism and the attempts of that Gallic country to become one of the world’s most powerful nations. Other images correspond to companies which, for a variety reasons, are no longer in operation. They have left behind some factory fossils that are testament to the audacity of their commercial endeavor. Today we see them as spaces laden with poignant historical memories, as locations that shaped the social profile of a time when we grew and from which we still have difficulty extricating ourselves completely.
Alternating between painting and photography allows the artist to adopt different points of view: at times she seems to exalt the product of rationalism and organization; at others, she appears to occupy the position of witness of an ending or a decline. Additionally, they enable her to use different conceptual approaches to the subject of portrayal: with painting she tends to construct monumental images using a series of fragments whereas her photographs tend to be based on a single image which she then divides, intervening in its foundation.
Each medium contributes its intrinsic qualities. Painting is a unique, unrepeatable product; its manual realization encourages us to consider its details, material accidents, transparencies and opacities, its planes and lines. By contrast, photography appears as a serial medium that is technical, distant and lacking density. Painting is dirty and laborious; photography, light and aseptic. Painting is production and proximity; photography is observation from a distance. While the former cannot be free of the subjectivity of its author (in terms of the selection of the subject and the way of expressing it on canvas, at the very least), the latter suggests the property registry and the archive.
Viviana Zargón encourages us to contemplate our recent past, no longer for the purpose of refreshing our historical memory but rather with the clear intention of reflecting on the world today. Her work reverberates with the echoes of projects and ideals that still summon us and of which we are a consequence, to some extent. Her archeological perspective is analytical rather than nostalgic, yet her exploration is poetic rather than scientific: it is not based on precise statistics but on illusions, the roads traveled and the heart.