Ryan Gander in a game of clues

Caceres,

He is the author of sculptures, film projects, installations, performances and proposals linked to writing and graphic design, but most of Ryan Gander’s works offer a narrative aspect and are based on the association of ideas: they seek to connect what we have for the everyday and the esoteric, the most common and the ignored, questioning along the way the languages of both art and knowledge and the ways in which artistic pieces are created and exhibited. We can consider the whole of his production as a puzzle, a network formed by multiple fragments of stories: a set of clues that wait, ultimately, to be deciphered by the viewer, who will have to carry out his own associations to try to unravel the complex staging of this British creator, born in 1976, who lives and works between London and Suffolk and, not coincidentally, trained in Interactive Art at Manchester Metropolitan University.

His first European anthology, which is also his first exhibition in Spain, opened its doors a week ago at the Helga de Alvear Museum in Cáceres and brings together sixty works that he has carried out in the last two decades; They are the result of his questions, with an evident conceptual background, about the changing world in which we live – given its pace, any answer to these questions becomes obsolete quite quickly, so for Gander the doubt itself is more important than its resolution. and also of his faith in the imagination as a means to transcend the real when it overwhelms: I think that our imagination can help us achieve a higher vital state; only if we use it, of course… Our imagination is like a muscle that needs to go to the gym regularly.

The creations gathered in “Grunts, hisses, moans, barks and screams”, which is the name of this exhibition, have to do with concepts such as authorship, value, chance and our mortal condition; They are structured in the route, precisely, around thematic threads in which recently produced projects and other well-known ones converge.

Among these latest works we can mention the sets of posters A multitude of ghostly ambitions (No power in the market, no voice in the system) either A Multitude of Ghostly Ambitions (Rock, Paper, Scissors): he has conceived them for group exhibitions, although fictitious; They never happened, but for the artist they must have taken place. To other fictional characters, and of his invention (Abbé Faria, Irwin Green, Santo Sterne, Rose Duval, Mary Aurory, Spencer Anthony, Vivi Enkyo and Aston Ernest), he has dedicated the monographs Even I have lost interest in myself; and to other scenarios, random and that we will surely not know, Gander intends to take us in A machine to send you somewhere elseby the very mechanical procedure of approaching a thermal receipt printer with a motion sensor. We are provided with the latitude and longitude coordinates of some point on the planet (on land, not in the ocean), chosen by an algorithm. The spectator can take some other piece with him, such as a copy of his motivational Letter to a young artisthandwritten and wrinkled, without a defined recipient; a very personal version of Rilke’s text for poets.

Ryan Gander. Ryan Gander. Growling, hissing, moaning, barking and screaming. Helga de Alvear Museum

One of his most poetic works, also in Cáceres, is the 2016 video Dancing with my own agencies (The space between departure and arrival): took a documentary that the BBC gave him, Ryan Gander – The Art of Everythingto transform him including a whirlwind of stars that constantly revolved around his head, a kind of aura that he grants himself. Its second part is Dancing with my own agencies (The world will adapt to you)in which he reviewed a video commissioned by the BBC about Japanese visual culture to superimpose clouds of dust and dirt on his own figure, some linked to the Snoopy by Shulz.

His collaboration with television in his country has gone even further: at the network’s request he made the documentary Me, My Selfie and I with Ryan Ganderin which he displayed his vision of the culture of the self in our time and the so-called economy of attention: on his own face he incorporated animations again, until turning his face into a mask that was never the same when it appeared on the screen; Those masks, by the way, referred to abstracted but well-known effigies from the history of art.

The piece alludes to the inevitable passage of time and its effects. Notes on nothing – Seeing how oneself falls: a cube from whose faces electromagnetically controlled points emerge that seem to generate drops in the lower part of the figure, deteriorating it along random sides while we listen to various texts that address precisely the inevitable of the passing of the years and the withering, also of the reconstruction options.

Their snow-beaten designer chairs serve a somewhat similar purpose; your nostalgiathe lost wax bronze replica of his shoes; or manually created calendars Yesterday, today and tomorrowwhich include notes and images taken from the artist’s notebooks. Even of a mosquito about to die, he presents us with an animatronic sculpture: it is called Everything is accounted for; Another features a mouse hidden in a hole in the wall who recites, in the voice of the artist’s daughter, a philosophical speech about The Great Dictator and, one more, a female gorilla who, wanting to educate herself, is trying to learn to count on her fingers.

The reflections, the enigma of that replica, focus I am… (Ixxxi)an installation in which a mirror is covered by a plastic that prevents it from fulfilling its function, or the two bronze sculptures of the same young dancer, reminiscent of those by Degas, that make up the set All things being equal either I am with you. Another young dancer will wait for us, however, alone (Irremediably disconnected from the past or Easy Fruit), next to an empty pedestal from which we imagine her descending.

It is not daring to affirm that the autism of one of his children is behind several of Gander’s strategies to approach the viewer through emotional and different paths from the usual ones: hundreds of people address Baxter Ian Gander, as the young man is called. postcards that together give us the image of an unfinished marble sculpture by the British and that move for twenty seconds; This sculpture captures your child in his natural state, in an almost constant movement, which is part of the self-stimulation strategy. stimmingwhich helps sufferers of this disorder relieve excess cognitive information. Baxter Ian himself, by the way, is the author of How the soul produces code (Pathological evasion of requests I): On lined paper he pasted metallic stickers that generated a random musical composition that a musician could perform.

Other proposals will open to the future, such as his series of fortune cookie papers hidden in paintings based on the joining of glass using insulating tape: these works contain an action to be committed.

It is possible, in any case, that one of Gander’s clearest thoughts inserted in this game of divination and temporal slipping that constitutes the exhibition is offered by the title of the installation that groups, randomly dispersed on the floor of a room, contours of euro, credit cards, identification documents, access cards, boarding passes and presence control tokens: What you lack in poetry you cannot compensate for with ambition.