Claudio Larrea
Porteños
Curator: José Manuel Elliot
March 2 to April 4, 2023
Curatorial text
To be is to be in the city
If there is something that synthesizes the contribution of the Frankfurt school, it is the ensemble of sociology and philosophy. Hence the flaneur importance that, while walking the city with an attentive eye to what is happening, builds a puzzle that gives us clues about existence. In the case of Claudio Larrea and his exhibition “Porteños” that eye is the camera: like a hunter, he goes appropriating the ineffable crosses between city and citizen, anchored in the tradition of the Horacio Coppola from Buenos Aires 1936.
There is more than one shot in which the man is an apparently insignificant reference, and therefore potent, in the middle of an amplified urban landscape: someone who climbs up the obelisc and looks like a little spider silhouetted against the white wall, a sky full of clouds and the tower of the classic building of the Jeweler Watchmaker Trust; boys playing ball on a rooftop among hundreds of grey buildings, leprous party walls and lighting cables; a lonely person who gets off his bike to talk on his cell phone under a huge column with a winged lion; two people sunbathing in front of the Pizzurno Palace; a man turned into a small dot at the bottom of a garage ascent; men reading in a bar with a checkered floor, while the wind raises the curtains. What do these scenes tell us about if not a difference in scales? What are they talking about if not the asymmetry between man and his environment? Buenos Aires, a walkable city, molded to the human foot, is the place where that man feels comfortable. In Larrea’s photos there is a secret exaltation of the individual: it is both an asterisk and the terminal nerve through which the significant, the considerable crosses.
They say that censorship sharpens the imagination. A by-product of this affirmation, based on the prohibition of direct portraits without consent, is the richness that the characters acquire with their faces covered (by pumpkins, ski masks or a phonograph on sale) or directly from behind. The advantage is ambiguity, what is not said, what can be glimpsed, as in those thick hair that look like bundles of electrified wires.
There is finally a series of images that introduce, not without irony, the religious and the metaphysical in everyday life: a kind of split screen is inscribed in this register with a woman sunbathing on the right, while on the other side two walking nuns completely covered with their characteristic clothes; the homeless Muslim lying next to a poster that questions education; orthodox Jews whose apparent anachronistic formality contrast with a poster that talks about time and the scar of the missing municipal plate; or, finally, the priest concentrating on an aperitif advertising.
Other scenes allude to the political degradation of a country that does not look forward: a vandalized bus stop, with a waiting passenger; pensioners protesting; a boy brandishing an advertising poster for an agency that invites people to take advantage of retirement without contributions; a strange demonstration next to a beat-up van; a premonitory cotton candy seller that recalls the explosion of a nuclear mushroom cloud. Perhaps the photograph of a woman trying to move inside a crowded bus and wearing a T-shirt with an eye on the back may be included in this lot as a symbolic condensation.
Juan José Sebreli and Marcelo Gioffré
