Paz Errázuriz .- Cuerpos
25/May/2013 - 20/Jul/2013
To bring the current season to a close and in collaboration with PhotoEspaña Off, Espacio Mínimo presents the first solo exhibition in Spain of Chilean artist Paz Errázuriz. According to Nelly Richard, Errázuriz’s works show, “the floating ambiguity of maybe, of perhaps, that operates in the photographs of Paz Errázuriz like an inductor of suspiciousness around what is really strange in them, make us distrust of the social index that catalogue normality and abnormality. After looking to one of her photographs, we project the shadow of the same distrust towards all categorization presumably guaranteed. The identities depicted by P. Errázuriz – identities that range from the common (the ordinary, the quotidian) to the uncommon (the hideous, the unusual, the extremeness) – fall under the same light examination, [and] they are inexorably subjected to the same definition of features and characters.”
The exhibition is formed by two of her most recognized photographic series: Bodies (2002), whose title gives name to the show, Tango (1986), and her only video work, “The Sacrifice” (1989-2001)
About her work in Bodies, the artist declares:
To refer to the professions or trades of the photographed is like dressing them up by giving hints of something else. That is why I like these bodies. ¿Who is the street peddler of fluorescent tubes, the ex flyweight boxer or the ex rock and roll and mambo dancer? ¿Who is the glass blower that blows Christmas ornaments and that has to stop because of Chinese plastic ornaments competition? ¿Who is the furrier that has a kiosk in downtown Santiago where she mostly sells condoms? A couple worried of what their Mormon son would say, or another that talked with their deacon and was told not to worried because “that is why god created mankind in his own image”.
I wanted to portray these people because it was, once again, a way to meet the human being, to confront the elderly, to listen their opinions, to know how they relate to their bodies.
In words of Chilean writer living in Germany Hernán Valdés, In addition of being danceable, the Tango is the most complex and heterogeneous expression of universal music. It is pathetic, sensual, kitsch, sublime, sardonic, cruel, nostalgic, and, thus, the best erotic trigger.
On this series, Enrique Lihn wrote in 1988:
The tango image of Paz Errázuriz – a tango without lyrics, music or movement, frozen primarily at the key moments during which one might be able to identify the dance that the dancers dace- attests to the authenticity of the representation of a representation.
In the artist career, The Sacrifice represents a rupture with the line of work that she has developed as a photographer, a work that has been internationally acclaimed. The video The Sacrifice is an innovative proposal that, at the same time, is inevitably coherent with the rest of her works. During nine minutes, we attend to the slaughter of an animal, a quotidian scene constructed by 16200 frames registered with a super 8 camera and, later, edited by the artist. This sequence was recorded by Paz Erráruriz in 1989, a year of significant events, and was left, following her own words, “deactivated in the pending tray”. In 2001, more than a decade after, the artist decided that it was the right moment to articulate that story. In words of Gwen Kirkpatrick, ‘[the work] is a sort of homage to the experience of death and pain, to the experience of being witness of it. There is no narrative explanation because there is no explanation possible. The images’ strength, with their inexorable presentation of the lamb’s agony, the meticulous task of the butcher and the impossibility of evading the vision of the dismemberment of a being that just minutes before we have seen alive, confronts us with a real death, with a non-symbolic death.
