Ángel Mateo Charris, the future between clouds

Barcelona,

In his beginnings in the eighties, Ángel Mateo Charris brought his production closer to the language of comics before gradually approaching a pop aesthetic (especially after his first stay in New York, where he studied Hopper and American painting of the 19th century). XIX) and, although he has never completely abandoned this, since then and until now he has been naturally assimilating very diverse references, taken from different periods in the history of art and also from the theories on postmodernism that he learned about during his studies. years of training. To these influences we must add that of the compositional methods of graphic design, an area in which he worked as soon as he finished his degree in Fine Arts.

Figuration has been his constant playground, but he has not always used it to convey the same messages: especially after one of his largest exhibitions, the one dedicated to him between 1999 and 2000 at the IVAM in Valencia, Charris sought to undertake a line of personal reflection and his own poetics, based, more than on other people's imaginations as until that moment, on his travels around the world.

Until last January, this artist from Cartagena presented “Futurama” at the Sala Verónicas in Murcia, an extensive set of recent works in different formats that did not escape his usual style (that clear-line figuration), but did take us to new places. : to parallel universes in which he has tried to pour his impressions about the years to come, remembering, and hence the title of the exhibition, the series devised by Matt Groening and, specifically, the pavilions with that name that, in the exhibitions universals of 1939 and 1964, they speculated on what the following three decades could bring to the artistic sphere.

In very varied formats and using also disparate techniques, from collage to graphic plots, he displayed intuitions and possibilities necessarily halfway between the present and the guessed, focusing his attention on those points where both spheres could overlap.

From that exhibition derives the one that, until next March 30, hosts the Sala Parés in Barcelona, “Futurama Exprés”, but it will be easy for us not to have the impression of finding in these works only utopias, premonitory scenes or possible fictions, but rather visions of the cracks of our time and our uncertainties, that is, recreations of that sensation that we live at the end of an era, that we no longer relate as before and it is possible that we will never do so again, or that (after the pandemic) what is disastrous is no longer paranoia but possibility.

Ángel Mateo Charris. Futurama Express. Parés Room

Some of these visions may seem idyllic at times, very ironic or disturbing at others, but in most cases they will be a manifestation of that doubt in which it seems that we have been living for a few years, of the absence of solidity and of our daily lives submerged. in a floating state that, already in 2014 and in The damned of the screenGerman video artist Hito Steyerl seemed to describe: Disorientation is due in part to the loss of a fixed horizon (…) And with the loss of the horizon, the withdrawal of a stable paradigm of orientation that has established, throughout modernity, the concepts of subject and object, of time and space, also begins. As it falls, the horizon lines explode, twist and overlap.

Conspicuously or not, one of the responses to this state of suspension and inconsistency is an exhibition of inevitably superficial theoretical happiness that only manages to feed the insecurity of those who digitally show it and digitally receive it. Maybe they also save it in the cloud; In steam, space and time are difficult to measure and, surely for this reason and for everything we doubt, mists are almost omnipresent in these images by Harris.