Flip 2024

“Periods of turmoil are always the hardest to live through, but it is in these moments that life screams louder and awakens those who have not yet completely succumbed to the condition of zombies—a condition to which we are all destined by the trafficking of vital impulses.” – Suely Rolnik [1]

In the historiography of modern art, Western mass culture has been a symbol of degradation, representing that effectual advance capable of sweetening and promising inaccessible worlds. Its ability to turn information into noise has generated devastating consequences, which we are experiencing right now. But mass culture was once entrusted with the hope of a social and liberating change, whose power would lie precisely in halting the overwhelming voracity of capitalist industries and institutions.

The other mass culture, the one that embraced the Dionysian impulse of uniting art with life, is the one that at certain facets of history has revealed the processes of colonial oppression while simultaneously showing the weakness of capturing, as Suely Rolnik points out, the life force of individuals. This mass culture is represented, for example, by a certain zone of Argentine pop, which has taken the popular as a tool to halt conservative scrutiny. Ephemeral and vitalistic, Argentine pop of the 1960s acted as the starting point for blind confidence, among other things, in one’s own image, in using the body to denounce stereotypes of sexual identity.

Matías de la Guerra’s work has configured itself, we could say promiscuously, in the resonance of that moment of pop. And he has done so by carrying the vernacular of this trend and championing a kind of blind faith in the popularity of contemporary Salteño art. The yellow fantasy, which tinges his visual universes, also leads us to the hypothesis that the happening, the driving force of the performative dimension of the arts, is re-signified in each loose-hair performance, in each hairography. And therefore, this exhibition that recalls the power of hair for different cultures since ancient times stages the urgency of movement, in a mixture of programmed choreography and improvisation.

In 1991, Gloria Trevi released her single ‘Pelo Suelto,’ a song where she declared:

I like to walk with my hair loose

I like everything that is a mystery

I like to always go against the wind…

It is clear that, at certain moments, and more so in those where neoliberalism intensifies its task of stimulating the accelerated replication of zombies, the culture of loose hair can become a countercultural movement, a variant of those many expressions that denounce false models of freedom.

In the eight drawings presented here and in this sort of surrealist suite of the secession proposed by Matías de la Guerra, domestic life, movement, humor, elegance, repetition, and simulation are unfolded. In the performative installation, a six-meter table covered with a yellow tablecloth serves as the support for an action where five hands hold objects and move to the rhythm of a soundtrack.

It should be noted that the spectrum of surrealism is present here as an emblem of insufficiency, connoting a register of an era. Because today, mere love for the concubinage of opposites seems insufficient. Surrealism has been surpassed by reality, which has paradoxically become increasingly surreal and loudly screams the urgency of new escapes, towards other underground realities. As an antidote to this trend of imbalance between reality and surrealism, the artist has long turned to his own world, anchoring himself in his personal history. In his projects of photographic production, digital design, ceramic realization, installations, and now in this performance, Matías has nurtured a vocation for self-representation. He has done so not only through portraiture but also through the stories that his works hold. For example, in this case, he revisited one of his childhood play routines: he transformed his hands into heads whose hair, made from materials taken secretly, moved like puppets.

“Lana, my mother, always used to knit. And when she went to the kiosk, I would cut pieces of wool that I later washed with shampoo in the bathroom. When they threw away the wool, I locked myself in the bathroom to play in the same way, but with toilet paper. The fox’s tail appeared when I went to the countryside on Sundays. The list of materials continues from a set of keys to a plastic bag; I found all these objects at home, they were there, waiting for me to discover them, and with palpitations, I imagined the best pop concert.”

This concert, a mixture of communal table and monarchical or ecclesiastical banquet, has something of the transtemporal mystery, of a theatrical construction anchored in the beyond of finitude. But it also assumes the thrust of pop in an era of irradiation of countless legacies and memes. It is here that Lady Gaga, muse of Matías and of many young people of his generation, appears as a ghost pointing to the shelter of eternal superstars and the affective, intimate, and regional capitalization of intransigence.