Mercedes Cassanegra
Viviana Zargón knows she dwells in a certain time and place. These are the present, a post industrial era, a never sufficently industrialised country and a big metropolis. Her realistic painting, but with a careful restriction of elements, recurrently deals with the same subject matter: the typical industrial architecture, inactive, paralyzed and abandoned factories of a recent past. She herself recounts visiting all these real places to photograph them, to obtain her testimony, and to experience the atmosphere of the locations. Her work is the almost obsessive re-elaboration of different views of those disused and abandoned places.
The format of the works, rectangular, square, or circular in shape, bears a strong presence of the architectural project of each site, as if the building structure exactly coincided with the “atmosphere construction” of each painting. In some cases, in which the complete image has been fragmented, she has resorted to iron sheets or stainless steel yuxtaposition. These materials imply ambivalence. On the one hand, they are in accordance with the adjoining images, they are in harmony with them as they might have had a protagonic role as the raw material of the portrayed scenarios. On the other hand, its polished appearance offers a preciosistic effect next to that abandonment. And it is at this point that it is considered that a sense code has appeared in a polar pair: ruin-thoroughness, desolation- preciosity. In the result, neither the experimentation of those empty places nor their prior use is evidenced, as a neutralization of the thematic contents seems to have taken place . A precise moment has been frozen and something has been veiled. The artist has not only removed the color, but has also left aside all attempt of expressionism. Her pictorial virtuosity has had as one of its main aims to purge those places from any human print or trace, a resource between tradition and the mec-art. That is to say, through a certain pictorial treatment, the artist has managed to modify the very same content of her discourse. Even though we are before figurative work, the just mentioned method: “brings us closer to the immaculate chromium-plated surfaces, typical of the ‘cool art’ and ‘harded edge’” 1 characteristic of the “New American abstraction”. Just as it is implied by the English word, has reality turned cooler? It is when we question ourselves about this issue that we start wondering whether this is actually about reality. Thus, it is when we go back to the images that we perceive this vacuity 2, a recurrent and singular theme in Zargon. Vacuity and nostalgia seem to be here an inseparable duality. Something has been dispossessed of its content and there is a return to pain. It is about reality, but not about a reality of appearance, of externalizing, but about a reality of an internalizing condition, a reality which belongs to an intangible place, and which is difficult to be perceived by the sight. We can talk about a place, but about a remote place in the sphere of subjectivity.
On the other hand, the images of the constructions are not necessarily the exact register of them , but they carry somewhat symbolic meaning , they are the very same metaphor of the person. There is a movement from an economic and social context to a more intimate and individual one. There is an identification between the built construction and the subject who lives his life trying to “build himself” and tries to recover an integration lost due to fragmentation. There is a dream of a gold or silver castle, and there are circumstances who drive you further apart from or closer to it. And here is also our obsession as well of the others who draw them in the clearest way ever.
Mercedes Casanegra
Argentine and International Association of Art Critics