Rodrigo Alonso
Photography is Viviana Zargón’s point of departure for constructing her pictorial universe. Huge empty spaces— the majority pertaining to factory architecture—appear one after the other, depicted with a level of precision and detail surpassing that provided by mere recall. In order to achieve this, she avails herself of a technique that reveals her dependence on a visual register, one referred to in art lingo as photo-realism. She voluntarily adopts the camera’s vantage point with everything that implies in terms of a visual and semantic configuration of reality, but then chooses to embody it in painting, with its singular procedures and tradition, its density and iconicity.
In recent years, however, she has added the photographic support itself to her body of artistic production. Although this incorporation might well seem to have been inevitable, the fact that it is posterior to her plastic explorations presents a possibly paradoxical question. At exactly what point does photography cease to be painting? In Zargón’s way of thinking, which of technical representation’s properties have acquired a conceptual stature that might make them capable of sustaining the armature of a work?
The Objetos inútiles (Useless Objects) series (2011-2014) offers several clues in this regard. Situated on a regular, repetitive grid, portraits are taken of a group of tools and pieces of furniture removed from their context, set against a uniform gray background in a scale that presents each piece in a similar size, making up some kind of catalog of extravagant, solitary and anodyne bodies. Upon closer observation, each piece reveals an unmistakable singularity, the result of some human intervention, the passing of time or use. The artist’s desire, however, has been to show them as equivalents. Borrowing the categorical representation that Bernd and Hilla Becher made popular as a form of registering standardized habitable and factory architecture, Zargón focuses her gaze more on the abandoned state that they have in common than on their visual peculiarities. This state of abandon is the key to reading this series, which brandishes a sharp commentary on the fate of the planet's industrial adventure.
Photography proves to be an ally in this task, because it helps to bring out equivalence more than uniqueness. Painting is always a unique, unrepeatable product; its manual craft invites us to draw close to examine it in detail, its material accidents, transparencies and opacities, line and plane. Photography, on the other hand, taken from an adequate distance, enlarged to precise dimensions and reiterated in just the right sequence, will prevail as the serialized medium that it is, technical, immaterial, distant and lacking density.
Painting is laborious and messy; photography is light and antiseptic. Painting speaks of production and proximity while photography entails observation from a distance. This is the point of view most appropriate for Viviana Zargón’s critical proposal. This gaze liberates objects from their emotional traits to present them in their raw, technical dimension. It is a gaze that empties objects of their usefulness and condemns them to the archive at the very instant that it singles them out to shine.
These series form part of a larger project in which the artist highlights the leftovers from a de-activated industrial culture. Machines that have fallen into disuse, factories in ruins, and gutted companies comprise a singular inventory, compiled over the course of many years. Photography plays an essential role in the construction of this reservoir of images, not only due to the simplicity it offers in organization and storage, but fundamentally because of its testimonial nature.
If Zargón's choice of monumental architecture is examined attentively, nothing that presages desolation and deterioration can be found in them. They are spaces conceived of to receive large numbers of people, erected using tenacious or unalterable materials (iron, concrete, etc.) held aloft in solid, rational structures. Their deterioration is not the consequence of the passing of time or wear and tear, but of human will and intentional abandon. As witness to deeds transpired and as a warehouse of memory—its primary social use—photography transcends the instance of description focused only on form by way of a narrative that encourages historical reflection.
The eloquence of the visual record does not detain Zargón. She performs further operations on the images: she folds them, fragments them, makes cuts in the continuity of the reality they represent and introduces pauses into the continuous stream of reading them. She confronts viewers' perceptual structures with the architectural structure of the buildings, challenging them to visually and mentally recompose the photographic print's organic imagery. She interferes with the possibility of capturing the totality of some of the images, inviting visitors to move physically from one end to the other to see them. In other words, they are presented as being impossible to grasp all at once, any reading of them that is based on immediate recognition is hindered.
This work that is contiguous with the images, or better yet, with their presentation, emerges as the result of comprehending the particularities and demands intrinsic to each mode of representation. Here, certain aspects of register call for painting, others for photography, others for narrative, others for archives and yet others, history. In recent years, Viviana Zargón has focused on refining these decisions and articulating their consequences on her own conceptual universe and, by extension, on viewers' mechanisms for reading her work. This process has granted her production the complexity and density of a veritable investigation in aesthetics.
Her capacity to probe deeply in exploring the devices involved in image construction has led to interesting spin-off situations. We can take the photographic piece Palais des Machines (15 folded paper modules, 2011) or the painting Sin título, de la serie Palais des Machines (Untitled, from the Palais des Machines series) as examples. In both cases the artist takes the same reference as the point of departure—a slightly distorted record of the Palais des Machines, a pavilion built for the 1899 Universal Exposition in Paris—fragmented into sections that subvert its visual continuity. In this case, however, the effect is different. Here photography emerges from cropping an image that was originally complete, as opposed to the painting, where each segment of the polyptych has been painted separately; they do not derive from the fragmentation of a canvas with a whole image. While cropping produces an effect of discontinuity in the photographic sections, in the painted ones the sequence of fragments produces exactly the opposite, a sensation of continuity.
For this reason, painting and photography do not enter into conflict in Viviana Zargón’s work. Each medium provides an arena of reflection that is adequate to concerns that go beyond technical expertise, although this may often be what catches the viewer’s eye at first glance.
Finally, the themes and images that populate her work constitute another aspect of it that is certainly no less relevant. The empty factories she portrays with their monumental constructions transformed into scenarios of desolation suggest a sense of the end of an era, aside from their particular resonance in terms of Argentina's contemporary economic and political situation. They speak of the expired hopes placed on industrialization, on the culture of labor that accompanied it during its most prosperous moments as the central axis of public well-being and society's material progress. They speak of the crumbled foundations of modernity itself, along with its promises, challenges and utopias.
In her most recent photographs, Zargón adopts a different perspective in recording these places. This has to do not only with the inclusion of color and exhibiting the images without splits, but also with the way they appear in her representation. While the architectural structures enjoyed an undisputed leading role in the black and white photos that even included admiration for their forms’ rationality, in her newer works there is a shift toward showing the space as the scenario of latent events. Now there is a notable absence of human beings, whereas previously it might have gone unnoticed. What we see are no longer empty places, but solitary places; her recording of them has a more markedly documentary tone. A forgotten broom, piles of sacks, some light left turned on and strict order all insistently point to the workers who are not there but once filled these halls.
With the appearance of this trace of narrative, Viviana Zargón's photographic work ventures forth on a new path of promises, challenges and labor.