Nono Bandera .- Zweifel
17/Mar/2011 - 07/May/2011
NONO BANDERA has chosen Zweifel as the title for his sixth solo show at Espacio Mínimo. Zweifel, a German word meaning uncertainty, was the first word that the artist heard when he arrived to Berlin. Fascinated by the sonority of this term, he noted it down immediately in his notebook. Since long time ago, three notebooks or journals of drawing accompany his travels: one finished with notes containing ideas of the last two or three years, a second one already started and a last one in blank. From these notebooks emerges a working procedure where new stages and previous ones communicate fluently. The resultant creative process, based on self quotation from the archive of uncompleted ideas that are the notebooks, define the leit motif of the project: a residual product, the leftovers of experiences and discoveries, a compilation of memory remains.
Moving away from the Greek ideal of perfection expected in the academic drawings employed as medium, NONO BANDERA drifts apart from its limitations based on order and proportion. The romantic ideal, where disparity and disorder mark the guidelines, is the source that generates the work. Disconcerting scenes are juxtaposed to the clumsy classicism of the drawings creating strange and uncanny sets. Thus, veiled, present in the form of its absence, the uncanny manifest itself. Following Eugenio Trias affirmation, the uncanny constitutes condition and limit to beauty, if the uncanny reveals itself manifest, the aesthetic effect disappears. In this sense, the series “Mr. Sandman”, in allusion to E.T.A Hoffman tale included in Freud’s The Uncanny, illustrates perfectly that artist modus operandi. In his own words and continuing with the account of his visit to Berlin:
That same night, having dinner with a friend, we talked about child tales and I told her that, since I was very young, I have always enjoyed scary tales, specially the uncanny ones. She told me a German one titled Mr. Sandman. In this short tale a terrible character visit child that doesn’t want to sleep at night. And throws sand to their eyes provoking their eyes to fall off their sockets. The next morning, I draw Mr. Sandman, but smartly dressed.
Like in previous projects, NONO BANDERA begins from pre existing works of art –in this case, academic drawings from the 50s- altering and re signifying deliberately its images. The creative process of Zweifel takes up again a stylistic resource suggested in his series This & That (2003), based on expanded painting where the traditional linear reading of the canvas is fractured. In this case, the artist renounces to the frame as the limit that contains the work of art, transferring his personal imaginary to the walls in a game close to mural painting. Thus, the wall, transformed in a scenario, conditions the interpretation of the work hanged and places it in a determined context. The installation produces a matryoshka effect: the image drew on the wall works like a structure that accommodate the drawing that, at the same time, contains the artist intervention.
NONO BANDERA (Málaga, 1958), is profesor in Facultad de BBAA of Pontevedra. After a fruitful perior as a child artist, and after finishing studies of fine arts in Madrid and Mexico D.F., he exhibits with regularity in art galleries and public institutions since 1995. His works are present in collections such as MNCARS in Madrid, Zabludovich Art Trust Collection in London, Colección UNICAJA in Málaga, Consejería de Cultura in Murcia, Diputación Provincial in Málaga, Ayuntamiento de de Palma in Mallorca, Diputación Provincial in A Coruña among others.
