Carla Arocha
Philippe Pirotte
Assuming the knowledge that the forms of visual art have been recuperated as decorative devices for today's lifestyles, the artwork of Carla Arocha consciously moves some of these elements back to contaminate the specific practice of making art and the particular historical space of painting where they are displaced. Infused with 'ingredients' out of the broader field of cultural production (ranging from patterns, fabrics, fashion and modernist painting to the knowledge of optical illusion and biological reactions) the apparent formal harmlessness of Arocha's work leads us astray and informs us about ourselves - uninvited.
A recent installation of a series of decorative ink-patterns on paper, by chance, (2003), executed with templates, challenges the initial imperative of making decisions. A viewer is impelled to choose what appeals to him the most out of a variety of optical patterns - studies.
Uncompromisingly continuous, in each of the drawings everything is the same yet different, refusing the issue of composition. Choice is permanently postponed confronted with what appears as a supposedly endless competing series of indifferent objects. The initial conveyed sense of availability slips away and gives place to a loss of orientation.
Snow, (2003) - it seems important to note the impossibility to reproduce the work - can be considered as paradigmatic for the operative mode of a lot of Arocha's art work. A 50 foot-long wall remains provocatively white until one's view adapts to the light and starts to discern three almost invisible hues of color. Bodily and mental perception obscure one another in a way particular to the artist's practice: the harsh binding light of snow causes one to see dead cells as the blind spots in one's gaze. Already in earlier work (Underground, 2002) reflecting on the biological and psychological effect of Sarin-poisoning, Arocha re-installed the eclipsing of orientation in the viewer's mind as caused by chemical agents.
Startled, (2000) consists of 10 mirroring surfaces installed in a corner of an exhibition space. On these surfaces, semitransparent foils, with colored circles are applied in a play of forms that partly frustrate reflection and engage an impulse of desire. The circles could evoke cartoony eyes forming an animated rhythm through the 10 surfaces. The circular forms, fixed and brilliant are naturally hypnotizing.
The spectator is automatically turned into a narcissistic subject by this installation; the desire to become object of the visual drive is inevitable. In Startled, the antinomy between the eyes and the gaze is visualized: the gaze belongs to the object replacing the blind spot in the field of the visual, as the site from where the image affixes the viewer to whom only the act of camouflage is left.
This is inverted in Vanessa, (2003), a very large portrait of a child. Colors deny one another and despite the presence of a 'named' content, the depiction breaks open in the field of opticality, undoing the rhetoric of recognizable imagery. But this undoing is, of course, not entirely successful: moving backs and forward, features appear at the threshold of unread ability. In a game of hide-and-seek, the concealed child can bear not being seen only for the briefest time.
As self-evident visual imperatives, the sharp vertical lines of Box, (2003), taken straight out of a design guide of how to fold a box and enlarged to a size that could fit the viewer, do not allow for conversation. The painting functions as a vanitas in relation to modernist self-referential abstraction and refuses the possibility of contemplation. As in most of Carla Arocha's works, Box infects our minds by leading us back to ourselves via an installment of contingency.
(FILES, project book edited by Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y Leon, 2003)
