Adriana Herrera
In the beginning was a little girl walking hand in hand with her father by the port of Buenos Aires and in her eyes is reflected the hectic bustle of ships, storage units and factories all around. It is an atmosphere full of promises in an Argentina that constantly sees the starting up and shutting down of machinery that project visions of prosperity dashed by the economic crises, corruption and dictatorships.
Then there is the training of this “industrial archaeologist” as Zargon calls herself, at the school of Fine Arts of Barcelona. Upon return to Argentina she works at the school of Arts Ernesto de la Cárcova, at the semi-abandoned port, where the ruins stand as a monument to the illusory that will be remodeled only years later. And then, in the mid-90s she begins to wander around with her camera capturing these surroundings that have so much collective illusion and gets the idea to create an artifice that consciously hides the visual simulation: creating almost monochromatic paintings of an architectural photograph with acrylics and showing ― from the means itself and the conceptual― the modernist fiction that went on in so many places at the end of the industrial revolution that turned into a futuristic celebration and then faded away.
I think about the series inspired by Les Palais des Machines, built in Paris to commemorate the centennial of the French Revolution in 1889, when Van Gogh revolutionizes the eye by envisioning The Starry Night. The construction was a large iron structure built to be taken apart, as it was in 1909, the year of the Futurist Manifesto, which proclaimed that a roaring structure was more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace and sang “to the gluttonous railway stations, devouring smoking serpents; to factories suspended from the clouds…” The various versions of Zargon, dated in 2011, deprive architecture of this vibrant fervor and all its momentum: they are paintings-installations that show, in broken up polyptychs or prints on folded cotton paper, the false unity of the fascinating iron structure, free of cladding, frozen in time. Break-up or partitions function like metonymy of inactivity and everything as far as has settled in post-modernity belonging to a great narrative, as Arthur Danto understood it. Her paintings express the photography of speculative architectures that are both reflections of the illusions of modernity as their own subjectivity. Zargon takes us to the uncertain social constructions of reality through the trap of representations that are seemingly credible, but are intersected by mazes of visual simulation. They reveal their fictitious quality.
Scenarios of non-existing industries today ―a cemetery of tow trucks and an abandoned village like Villa Fandria― emerge as visually powerful hallucinations that deny their own reality when looked at closer.
“I always lie a little,” Zargon says. This is evident in the Motul series (2010), which takes its name from an old gallon of oil. The pictorial representation may seem hyper-realistic, but close observation of each fragment reveals the perilous variation of elements that should be identical in a scene. These breaks in the continuity before us in the same space successively transformed in each fragment eventually show us that we are not looking at photographs, but neither are we looking at realistic paintings: what we see in Zargon’s pieces are consciously simulated spaces. She revives them by subjecting them to a game of relentlessly breaking them down, giving them back a fictitious nature. She has turned her paintings-installations into apocryphal places, scenes that change at her will to expose the traps of the fantasies of progress.
There is an implied time line in the paintings of real places fictionized by Zargon: a period that covers the transition of the great enunciations to the phantasmagorical. And at the same time, a meta-artistic intention that questions by representation with a recognizable language: the sudden appearances of red spots that alternate the monochromatic surface of the photographic simulation, the overflowing light, the intervals in black or white or metals, the way of folding the documentary photographs in partitions, separated by empty spaces, and the variations of scene represented repetitively in the same space. Each of these resources is a sign that warns us that it is not real but that at the same time decisively demands a keen eye to unravel it.
In the sixties, Gerhard Ritcher had already thrown us to a gray area where painting is dominated by photography and replicated it in fascinating portraits. But in the fictional paintings of old industries that Zargon installs, the lie of the representation reaches the status of an ontological truth: it reveals the fading out of the great stories of progress and frustration of what was not accomplished for those who live in the XXI century without the illusion surrounding modern architectures. What remains is the conceptual and visual pleasure of the deconstructions and the pictorial fiction that allows us to live on the edge of the portrayal of reality.