Plazas - paintings

“No” was the title of Verónica Madanes’s solo show at Fantazia -where all of this painting came together for the first time-. Though that somewhat authoritarian word imposes a certain distance, its use is constant for someone engaged in caring for a baby and a puppy. 

Don’t gnaw on the slippers, don’t put your finger in the outlet, don’t poop in the living room, don’t throw the computer out the window are obvious, almost intuitive, to an adult, but in the universe of little ones that one-syllable word is essential to setting a limit that will teach them how to relate to others. No is, at core, a spatial concept; it opens and closes doors.

Hold on! What does all of that have to do with this show, which doesn’t seem to have anything at all to do with puppies or babies, but paintings—or does it?

There might be similarities between walking a dog and painting, but it takes a little imagination and free time to find them. (Yesterday afternoon—unquestionably the best time of day for a stroll—I was lucky enough to visit paintings, specifically the ones hanging on the walls of Fantazia (one of the few art spaces I can walk to from home with my little one).

I had the distinct impression that the paintings I saw there are like plazas in, for instance, the qualities of the support and the layers of color on the surface. Plazas are usually rectangular; some are greener than others; they attract the curious; they lay out paths; you have to be careful with the brown because it can get filthy. 

The relationship between paintbrush and hand is also analogous to the tie between puppy and master. Sometimes the puppy pulls on the leash, and other times it gives itself over to being led. It is easy to imagine a puppy metonymically occupying the place of the bristles on a brush, especially when the brush marks a territory or goes back to the same spot time and again as if sniffing out something hidden. As it passes, the brush raises dust, stomps on grass, moves stones, chases a fluttering piece of newspaper, plays with a branch or ball, leaves a puddle of pee by a tree or a pile of poop on a path.

Madanes’s paintings show a wide array of landscapes, and it is tempting to construct a typology on the basis of that variation: there are nighttime cement plaza-paintings where drugs are trafficked; woodsy plaza-paintings for working out in the shade; enclosed plaza-paintings where babies are free to roam and exchange virus; plaza-paintings for sunbathing while gazing at the buildings on the horizon; plaza-paintings with drunks; and, of course, plazas-paintings with dogs. 

The landscapes in plazas—and, metaphorically, in these paintings—are also diverse, with more or less light, with playgrounds for kids or exercise gear, with the sound of cars or birds. Despite that variety, they all have something in common that makes them plazas; the essence doesn’t change, just the appearance. Perhaps that is due to the limitation of language, which uses a single word to identify very different things. That makes it impossible for us to understand that in fact each plaza—and each painting—is unique. Any dog knows that, no matter how hard it is for us to grasp.

Any art critic or any viewer with a sense of smell is—it could be argued—a bit of a bloodhound. Their intuition is not guided solely by the shapes and colors that come before the eye, not by the logical or deductive reasoning that observation yields. It is, rather, capable of following the scent of plaza-paintings to end up somewhere different, somewhere outside preestablished kennel-like categories.

Talking about painting is, in these times, almost as problematic as talking about fantasy. Some look to Marxist orthodoxies to try to interpret the history of class struggle in the marks left by paintbrushes. Worse still, others fall into some version of analytic philosophy, limiting themselves to consideration of technical aspects. Without an iota of sensitivity, they tell us to shut up about the things really worth talking about.

Exploring the positivity of the No opens up gates and draws connections. It could take us on a sunnier path through that specific sort of civilizing object called plaza-painting, an object no less important to the development of cities than the cathedrals, city halls, and banks that surround them. 

Plazas-paintings can be places to recreate and clear the mind, but they are also sites of protest and revolution, as well as stages for patriotic celebrations that consolidate power. They are, then, an ideal space for both the kingdom of authority and the birth of uprising.

(Mario Scorzelli for Jenniffer, a Buenos Aires based independent magazine for critical thinking. https://www.jennifer.net.ar/single-post/las-plazas-pinturas)