Elena Oliveras
What is the spell cast on us by the photographs of factory buildings, either unfinished or abandoned, in Viviana Zargón’s quests?
Time and again, she lingers on details captured by the camera and she always draws the viewer’s attention to a feature shared by all her subjects: abandonment. But is it only the emptiness, the desolation, the refusal to include a human presence, the humiliating indifference towards a splendor gone for ever, that engages her attention? If we accept the invitation to immerse ourselves in that strange, yet nearby world disclosed by her work, we shall find another theme: the presence of constructive order. We shall see not only the negative implications of abandonment (deterioration, disaffection) but also the positive implications of dignity and stability inherent to that order.
Zargón’s paintings show the tension between a Poetry of Emptiness and a Poetry of Construction. There are two different sources for the former. For one thing, the artist shows an incomplete world where everything is about to happen. On the other hand, she presents a world in which there is nothing left. She wants to depict before and after: what a factory looks like when it is being built and what it looks like when it is closed down. She feels that depicting movement, of men and industrial machinery – the incentive of futuristic painters – would detract from the fascinating interplay of curves, straight lines, diagonals, angles and edges. We would be unable to perceive the obstinato rigore of the builder that only the vacuum of time and action can exalt. Zargón rejects any kind of interference. True to her minimalistic calling of the eighties, when she was finishing her studies at the Barcelona Fine Arts College, she concentrates on the obstinato rigore. She admires it, she emphasizes it, she imitates it. She cuts, sections, and divides with a master builder’s precision. Then she separates the fragments in space. At times, a space is left empty. She adds panels painted in muted grey or she opts for stainless steel or iron bands. When she does that, the construction materials provide the “reality” data that remove us momentarily from the phantasma, the likeness of an image. In this way what has vanished reenters into our here and now, into our own and time. It comes back to remind us of what it was and to point out what it might come to be.
Zargón destroys the traditional concept of the picture as the base of a bidimensional continuum. This is not the first time she has broken the continuity of a given perception. This can also be seen in her urban landscapes from the early nineties, where the frame is incorporated into the main body of the work. We find the same effect later when she divides her pictures into two sections. The upper one has the appearance of a photograph, and repeats an iconographic subject (the front of a semi ruined house). In the lower half, there is a text where mathematical formulas and equations are interspersed with words (harmony, balance, gravity, proportion).
In her latest paintings, this upper/lower separation is replaced by horizontally shifting rectangular or circular planes that emphasize dominant structural aspects. The written words have disappeared. But the work “speaks” of a lost, ideal city, of a time when there are no longer any utopic hopes, of a society which thought it might have done better than it did, although in the Olam series, the small touch of red could be interpreted as the faint sign of a return to vitality.
There is a tendency to turn the work into a place of conflict, where emptiness is strained in the permanent presence of construction. If emptiness indicates the withdrawal of a human presence, construction brings it back to the centre of the stage. If emptiness brings us to the brink of the past or to an uncertain future, construction brings us back to the present. The artist creates in the present time and that is when the viewer must complete that creation, by utilizing his own unique indivisible body to put this empty fragmented body together again.