Unión presents Marek Wolfryd's exhibition, Una balada para dos espejos.

I. The western frame

In The work of art. Immanence and Transcendence (1997), the literary critic Gerard Genette proposes a review of the conditions or forms in which works of art exist or are manifested. It is a question of the material conventions, as well as the very definition, of the artistic object. In an approach that reviews different disciplines, it refers to the various modes of existence of the artwork: those that have to do with the artist's hand (the autographic form); those that, although they exist in multiple copies, such as the book object, are re-made each time a viewer or reader updates them (the literary work is allographic) and those of conceptual immanence or hyperalographic, which show the wide spectrum between the previous categories. The author, so relevant to the study of narrative structures and modes of textual transference, established in another of his works how to, for example, think of Proust as an emblematic author of the modern novel, it should not be forgotten that in order to to study In Search of Lost Time, a corpus of what the work was should be, and over the years loose fragments continued to appear that could be part of it. The limits of the artwork, its uniqueness, its closed character –he says in many ways– are a convention.

Our idea of the work of art is determined, mainly, by its place in Western modernity: the unique and closed work, made by an author and protected in legal terms as a rare commodity. Our literature on the arts is overflowing with endless disputes over the problems that this modern building of the artistic institution entails. However, a century after the avant-garde, more than half of conceptualisms and three or four decades of postmodern interrogations, no onslaught ends up demolishing that building. Multiple contemporary works insist on these questions, which are constantly remixed as a repertoire.

We have known, for a long time now, and we also comment quite frequently, that this building was not always this way, nor does it have to continue to be. Faced with the unique and locked artwork, we know of painter´s workshops with numerous members, of the versions of the same work made by an artist (we know of Ingres) and John Berger continues to make us nervously laugh every time we see him in a seminar of Ways of Seeing telling us there is a painting that both the National Gallery and the Louvre dispute as original and to this claim they dedicate bookish knowledge, economic resources and national pride. We love stories of stolen works (when they are recovered) and there are secret satisfactions in the tales where false signatures are identified.

Quite often, we participate in intellectual property protection stories and practices. These days, on the other hand, it is still disconcerting to think about the magical dimension of images and other ritual functions that survive in contemporaneity. Against all odds of contemporary art stories, and even in this crisis, the Western frame persists.

II. Papers from the East

Although it might seem so, this exhibition by Marek Wolfryd –an installment of the ongoing series The Infinite Path– is not inserted into the specific discourse of this modern macro-narrative, but rather proposes a specific addition to put it in perspective as a broad cultural construction. In other words, it does not only examine some of the problems of the original and the copy, the reproduction and the multiples, the signature, the collage, the plagiarism and the appropriation, the rewriting, the remixing and the post-production, all subjects of interrogations, persistent throughout the last century, the artist condenses all of them to oppose them with a different way of thinking.

This restlessness, let's say, comes from a different place. As in the origins of modern art, the East and its papers (prints, tapestries, writings and forms of representation even in wrappings) continue to offer us other relationships with images and their social roles. Although the artist´s previous work already circled questions about what art can be in late-late capitalism (after the productive forms from the workshop to the factory and the depersonalization of the processes to mere speculation), this time he sifts and reviews them from the perspective of a different understanding.

The text of South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han The Art of Counterfeiting and Deconstruction in Chinese (2011) is key to this question. In it, the author describes the referred western framework to oppose it with image production practices in China over several centuries and from various traditions of thought.

Faced with the Western understanding of the original as a cultural technique that appeals to truth, exclusion and transcendence, the author exposes how cultural techniques have existed where the relationship with images arises from an understanding of creation as a continuous process without beginning or end. One where the copies and reproductions are part of an anonymous and continuous process of combination and mutation, where the value of the addition is recognized and where counterfeiting (not to waive our terms) is rather an honorable way of making a contribution. There, the artifice teacher, architect of polyform and heterogeneous processes, contributes not a definitive work but a rather empty one to be filled: “In reality, creation is not a sudden event, but a protracted process that requires an intense dialogue with what is which has already been to extract something from it. The construct of the original erases what has been, that previous from which something is extracted” (Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2017).

Faced with the perspective of a culture where neither teleological narrative nor revolutionary disruption rule, the gaze is directed towards a type of resignation. In the fifth onslaught of the original image (after the avant-garde, the conceptual, the postmodern and the contemporary) the embrace of tradition is suggested: a discreet addition. These works are not milestones but the exposure of some layers of visualities that we continue to discuss. As the Consonni collective affirms, not quoting is a patriarchal practice.

III. An infinite gallop

Marcel Duchamp and the strategies he activated survive in those of Sherrie Levine, who reopened her questions in a different context and added others, to give them different possibilities of being thought. Now, Marek Wolfryd makes them reappear in a pictorial collaboration with Li Zi and Shenzhen Gallerie At Co., which in the exhibition space is supported by a sculpture that re-produces another where Richard Pettibone in turn revisits Brancusi. In contrast to the contemporary custom of not recognizing the subjects who produce the artistic objects of the artists, Wolfryd assumes a co-authorship with those whom he has commissioned the material production of these pieces in the workshops of the city of Dafen, in the province of Guangdon, where until 2015 60% of oil paintings were produced globally. A part of our system is exposed by signing the artists who make the works autographically, producers who probably don't care about our symbolic valuation system.

In repetition there is addition, but also wear, tear and dissolution. Along that path, from Pollock, artist of the free world, to Mike Bidlo and Wolfryd in collaboration with Xiao Feng and Xiamen RuoYa Arts And Crafts Co., we do not know what subjectivity is displayed, but there are infinite spots left to be filled. Thus, since model Brittany Pilgrim's self-portray on Instagram, then printed by Richard Prince, we find ourselves in a slowed-down relationship with the pixel in pictorial space in Wolfryd's version with Li Zi and Shenzhen Gallerie At Co. Similar is the way of the image of Michael Jackson and his chimpanzee, materialized in porcelain and later in lithographs by Jeff Koons, which in turn becomes a painting with Wolfryd in collaboration with Wen and Xiamen RuoYa Arts And Crafts Co. They also return to our eyes, as a collaborative painting, the images that Louise Lawler reproduces and dilutes starting with Warhol and Richter, who already used painting as a space for discourse regarding other images in cultural circulation.

This project results from the eternal galloping of the image, an acceleration that starts with Carlo Carrà's strokes then becomes the emulation of the ben-day dots of color printing in Roy Lichtenstein's painting, which will then be lost in the lines pencils of Sturtevant, converted into a painting by Wolfryd with Ading (reminiscent of adding) and Xiamen RuoYa Arts And Crafts Co. This infinite galloping, incessant recursion where a horseshoe is released, allows us to think that perhaps the questions are not about the theme and origin of the images but about the cultural techniques to which their survivals appeal. Here, the repetitions, copies and appropriations say less about some individual practices and more about the rites and cultural techniques that at different times make them possible.

In this exhibition, the works-additions appear before us in a space that used to be a white cube but has been covered with a wallpaper that contains an image designed by the company that produces it: an interpretation based on an illustration made in the manner of a Chinese classical/folk painting, this image also features a poem by the poet Li Bai regarding autumn season. The very title of this exhibition comes from an interpretation by the artist of another of Li Bai´s poems; the Lu Shan Ballad, dedicated to the censor Lu Xuzhou. The poem utilizes the idea of the mirror and the reflection by the author to critically notice the differences between the thought systems imbedded in Confucianism and Taoism. As a final layer, a version of these tapestries can be taken home with the added signature of the artist and the purchaser. Infinitely, other signatures, of the successive owners must be added. There is something in this project of the "shanzai", that term present in the contemporary that Byung-Chul Han refers to and that proposes the appropriation of a form or an idea, dismissing its status of originality, something valid not only for works of art but also for household appliances, clothing brands, architecture, food and public figures, and that they do not cease to amaze in the Western World with their inability to correspond with our idea of ownership and authorship. With this project, walking around in his Gucci shanzai cap, Marek adds a simple stroke that gives us an extra layer to our ideas of visual culture in a time that its at the same time, like Lu Shan's mirror, a cliff and a threshold.

— Christian Gómez