Associação Cultural Videobrasil

The imaginary texture of the real

Manolo Arriola's work deserves two surprising epithets, being the work of a video artist: it is pictorial and modern at the same time. These few lines, intended to function as an introduction, may justify these epithets. 

The consideration of merely formal and perceptive aspects as the main aim of every pictorial research is one of the central ideas - maybe the most recognised - of the reflection on modern painting. This “retinalism” denounced by Duchamp is closely connected to the search of a specificity of the medium that, paradoxically, accompanied video art since its beginning. Due to technical development and the preponderance of a particular artistic programme, many pioneers dedicated themselves to researching the quality of the images generated by this particular medium, as well as the characteristics that (apparently) differentiated video art from its closest “relative”: the cinema. 

“Paseo Catódico”, one of Arriola's first videos, can be related to those adventures of the conceptual pioneers due to its tautological use of image and text. His most recent videos present a series of paradoxes of the constituent elements of image itself and moving electronic image. In my opinion, Arriola's work can be viewed as modern, for it presents an analytical dissociation of the constituent elements of image. This characteristic of his work comes directly from his interest in art history, as he maintains a dialogue with tradition. Thus, it is no wonder that Arriola is interested in documenting the work of other artists, as we can realize in this Dossier. 

I will deal with a particular video to illustrate this analytical model. At the Paris Universal Exposition, in 1900, Mexican artist Jesús Fructuoso Contreras was the first Latin American artist to be awarded the Grand Prix of sculpture for his work “Malgré Tout”. Fractuoso, apart from carrying this peculiar name, had his right arm amputated. The fact that his sculpture (a marble woman crawling on the ground) was titled “Despite Everything” has always been associated with this unfortunate event in his life. 

The “Malgré Tout” by Arriola (who is called Manolo, and whose arms are in perfect condition) displays a woman wearing black lingerie and crawling on her knees, holding a strange object (which seems to be a gas mask) in her hands. The delayed, repetitive image can be directly related to the famous Muybridge's photographs. While this body, already transformed into language, connected with many signs, is crawling rather painfully on the ground, we see some masculine silhouettes that generate a peculiar spatial effect. In spite of the fact that the video presents a narrative and a sense of duration, they do not respond to the constructive logic of the setting - characteristic of moving image - but to the position of the elements in the scene, to a pictorial ratiocination. Temporality - nullified by repetition - has no function other than highlighting the latter. 

Under a contemporary perspective - developed in times of television and hollywoodian movies - this effect is practically impossible with a truly static image. In making use of this technique, Arriola exploits the most immediate qualities of the medium, its textures and colours, its “treatment”, and force us to recognise the compositional elements of the image as they are. “Despite everything,” using as few technical resources (artificial lighting, post-production) as possible, Arriola's work is already a still life, a picture (Carmen) or a scene (men fighting or playing basketball) which always returns to what Maurice Merleau-Ponty finds in Klee's and Cezane's works and calls “the imaginary texture of the real.”