LINES OF VANISHING
TANGENCE AND VECTOR IN
GEOMETRY AND POWER
BY MICAELA ALJOVÍN

GUSTAVO BUNTINX



—HUK—

GEOMETRY AND POWER,
the critical exhibition of Micaela Aljovín,
confronts us with an aesthetic challenge
radical.

Political / Poetic.

vectorize
the utopia and ruin of contemporary Peru.

deconstruct
the signage that gave it emblem
to that chimera
And to that collapse.

abyss
the greatest ideological illusion
and the biggest factual failure
of our so-called republican history.

Thevelasquismo:
a grandiose project
liberating,
but finally delivered
to corporatism more
regressive.

The nomenklatura
of bureaucratic and military castes,
agitated about everything
by deaf internal struggles
in which the idealistic elements
—ideals—
they would eventually be expectorated.
By General Velasco himself
—"The General of the Poor"—
that ignited their hopes before.

At the end of that dictatorship, in its two stages
(1968-1980),
lasted only
the state-worshipping megalomania,
the statist delusion
of the
em-pres-sas-públi-co-bu-ro-cráti-cas
that pushed us to fatal ineffectiveness,
to the eternal deficit, to endless corruption.

And plunged the country into misery,
in violence,
in terminal anomie:
the devastated fields;
the cities turned into slums;
balanced feed for birds
assumed as natural human consumption.

On the wasteland of that devastated land
Then the Senderista preaching germinated
that would later devastate the country
during the Peruvian Weimar Republic
(1980-1992).

But that posthumous tragedy
about politic
it was already encrypted in its symbolic dawn.
In the illusions that revealed to us delusional.

Like in the extravagant contests
to fictionalize the impossible portrait
of Tupac Amaru,
with the demand,
further,
to configure on it
aarchetype.

Not realizing that such an image
—as the shrill pointed out then,
the persecuted Juan Acha—
had already been conceived
in the brilliant graphic synthesis
designed by Jesús Ruiz Durand in 1969.

and then worn
for the demands
of rhetorical overrepresentation
in an increasingly authoritarian regime.

Y
EMPTY
.


—ISKAY—

The icon remains, however.

The synthesis of futuristic geometries
and ancestral
prodigiously embodied
in the trapezoidal motto of Ruiz Durand.
And then deranged, with unequal fortune,
in the imposed logomania
by corporatist metastasis
of the dictatorship.

It's that exhaustion
the one that Aljovín confronts
—and evidence, and sublimates—
stripping the emblems
of its first referentiality
to extract from its fragments
imaginary beauty
in a pure way.

That brings us back to some intense promise
in the tenuous geometric tradition
of our modern Peruvian art.
From José Tang and Gastón Garreaud
and Milner Cajahuaringa
Regina Aprijaskis, let's say.
Or even in another way
even Jorge Cabieses.

With the glow central again
again Ruiz Durand.

To end now,
with Aljovin,
in the greater paradox
of a historical formalism.

But free.
“Depoliticize the icon”,
that romantic formulation of the artificer,
It is alsopoetize it.

return it to thepoiesis,
to the anarchs transformations
of the authentic creative process.
derived from life,
stripped of ideology
(“false consciousness”, Marxdixit).

For, in that process,
politicizeagain our imaginary,
but in the most genuine way,
moreradical:
returning the term
to its etymological root.

The polis:
thetown,thecitizen,thecitizenship.
Thecivil society.

Theethos, theErosessential
of free will.
Against himthanatos,
fetishism
frozen in statist perversion.

The result is a precise abstraction,
also led to preciousness
of colors and techniques.
Of materials, even.

Thematerialism, the metal
beautifully worked
that in these pieces
serves as an artistic-industrial support
to its conceptual and plastic refinement
more incisive.

to apastelize, to sensualize,
feminize,
the symbolic and the chromatic almost martial
of the Power that set out to standardize our stocks
in a depressive greyness.

gray them,
literally.
In almost every instance.

From the Unique School Uniform
—“rat gray”—
even overexposed concrete
of brutal brutalist architecture
that gave it oppressive monumentality
to architectural expressions
of the regime.

It is that overwhelming mandate
the one that this exhibition
with such grace softens.
With an almost ornamental refinement
which, however, does not dilute
—rather sharpen—
his serious poetic / political mission:

transfigure into vector, intoLiberty,
in tangential motion,
the linear stasis of an era.

EXPIRED
.


— KIMSA —

But this sample also deconstructs
some hallucinated motto of another dictatorship,
even more ominous and vast.

Chavismo:
that Latin American fascism of the 21st century
—leftist fascism—
that when claiming as
"The New Geometry of Power"
perverts and instrumentalizes
the utopia of kinetic abstractions
conceived before
as the final liberation of the senses
in democratic Venezuela.

Of
ANCIENTLY
.


— TAWA —

It could all be summed up
in the major work of this sample.

one of the biggest
in our present art everything:
the overwhelming reinterpretation
of the magnificent icon of Tupac Amaru.

That image in its organic origins
-radiant-
here it shakes and disintegrates
on four metal panels,
undoubtedly associated with torture
by quartering
that they wanted to impose on the hero.
but also linked
—more strictly, more structurally—
at fourhisof the Inkario.

The four divisions of the Tawantinsuyo,
twisted now by blows and tensions
that curl them
until you give them a configuration
almost geological.

Although already contracted,
the materiality of the lower right panel
silver is still offered.
silver. Shiny.

a remnant of brilliance,
untouched only by acids,
in provocative counterpoint
to deliberate corrosion
from the other surfaces.
And to the ocher illuminations thus achieved
between its depressions and bumps.

like the golden foothills
—or ferrous, choose you—
in a broken mountain range of percusded cans.

Rusty. hammered.
Struck by history.

And for its myths.

The mythomaniac drive of utopias.
How much life they give to our dreams.

And both destroy our very lives.

To
LIFE
.


— CODE —

In the end
—and at the beginning too—
that is what this mathematical exposition is about.

This art that breaks down and releases
the repressive geometries of Power.

And thus opposes the tyrannical linearity
of thepolitics
the vector opening
ofthe poetic ones

Their
vanishing lines.
(Literally and figuratively).

of that math
—and aesthetically—
it is about:

SORT OUT
the (in)equation contained
by art made logo,
made grid.

EMANCIPATE
his formula of imprisoned creations
by the state monopoly.
And social.
And mind:
our ill-fated One Thought.
Slave.

TIE OFF
the most free association
of new beauty at dawn
of the Dream Revolution,
but then caught up in temptation
-the nightmare-
totalitarian.

RESCUE,tangential,
the remnant of utopia
despite everything still survived
under its graphic regimentation.

EXORCISE
its iconic instrumentalization
—state, statist—
from non-Euclidean geometry
of artistic fantasy.
And citizen.

Staff. Passional. drive.

LIBERTARIAN
.