Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Juan-Pedro Fabra Guemberena: vestiges of another scene

Data for a minimal biography: Juan-Pedro Fabra Guemberena was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in violent times (1971). When he was two years old, for political reasons, his mother was arrested for six months, “and this affected me profoundly,” declared the artist in an interview. From 1979 to 1984, he and his family were exiled in Sweden, for the same political reasons. From 1984 to 1989, he settled in Uruguay, a period in which democracy returned to his country and he started studying painting. In 1989, he returned to Sweden, and has lived there ever since. From 1997 to 2002, he studied at the Royal Academy of Art in Stockholm, which he left as a painter. After that, he went on to dedicate himself to photography and, later, to video.

Out of his varied works we have selected two recent ones to debate here: a video, whose title is Untitled 2004, and a series of photographs, Gilberto’s Place, of 2007. Untitled 2004 takes place in an unidentified woodland (despite the artist having identified it as the eastern part of an island in Sweden), a place rooted to the romanticism of the Nordic landscapes (and also of fairy tales). The sun is setting, until it (almost) vanishes: it is sunset, full of mortuary symbolism. For a few moments the landscape freezes. Night comes, or so it seems. Then Fabra proposes such a minimum narrative that it induces one to feel that the artist is fighting narratives: six camouflaged soldiers and a seventh dead one (dead?), all Swedes, stated the author. The dead soldier blends with the soil. He is completely in sight. The rest is material for interpretation. In this scenery, the characters (almost) don’t move. The dead soldier will emerge later on and his colleagues finally carry him off. In the end, the trees mesh.

The artist operates on the limit of visibility, and the scene is artificially lit, theatrical, but minimal. Like Boltanski, Fabra guides us to an invisible and quiet place. This video, like the rest of his work, offers more questions than answers. The atmosphere is generated by the suspense of the dead times: something maybe ominous, is about to happen. And the spectator is challenged to wait for what is about to happen. Differently, in front of a picture—in which it is possible to cover everything with just one glimpse—, it is not necessary to wait. However, Fabra always wants to paint; his photographs and videos will make sense if they capture the gaze that paintings call for. His language is not cinematographic. Neither is it the one of conventional video. It is in a fragile frontier, between painting and video.

Bill Viola usually makes references to painting, but he is more cinematographic than Fabra. In Viola’s videos, cinema meets painting and sound. This video by Fabra deliberately (almost) leaves out sound. The light would seem to come from cars driving down the highway nearby, throwing shadows. A resource of the same kind is used by Viola in The Passing, which shows in images—also nighttime and submarine—the limits of life, and does it opting for the light that comes from above. Fabra says that the lighting of the nocturnal landscapes in Untitled 2004 comes from a kind of stick used by the Swedish army for nocturnal battles: “Made of magnesium, a small parachute comes down, deeming it possible to picture a very broad landscape, which becomes exactly like sceneography.” But the sticks also recall fireworks, the fleetingness of things, the magic world of (lost) childhood.

Fabra films with a fixed camera and usually focuses on the foreground. “The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject,” as Walter Benjamin suggests in his famous paper “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.” “So, too, slow motion not only presents familiar qualities of movement but reveals in them entirely unknown ones.” (1) 

With this video, Fabra wanted to determine the time of things. And to generate a visual world against everything that was being seen in the communications media, subverting the budgets and the products of television, at a time in which it has been flooded with images of censored material. McLuhan saw this clearly when he warned that every time a new media appears, all those already existing are affected, as they must adapt to the new circumstances.

The scenes that Fabra films are portraits of (almost) still figures, as if they were images of framed paintings hung up on walls, part of a pictoric gaze. Viola’s figures, on the other hand, move, like in The Passions, for example, in which the author seems to be a painting specialist at a museum. But the succession of scenes by Fabra converts his video into a kind of moving painting, a video-painting. Like painters, Fabra works in the tradition of optic images and could even say: “I paint without painting.” The scene is framed in a romantic sunset (Robert Rosenblum pointed to the pictoric influence of Northern European tradition, especially romantic landscapes, on modern European abstract).

What is interesting to Fabra—as stated—is the specific development of uniform, of military attire, to which he gives identities while simultaneously questioning them. To the neoclassic Jacques Louis David, too: when Napoleonic times arrived and it was necessary to organize the State, he contributed by drawing and painting military uniforms.

“Photography has not replaced painting, nor has video replaced photography. A more and more complex grammar was generated, a richer language,” stated Fabra. Thus, when he dissolves the images of soldiers, putting them into a dark sunset, he could make one think about the inadequacy of photography to document a fact. But, pointing further in this direction, Fabra sets up the scenes he is going to photograph in studio (entering a tradition inaugurated by Poussin, who set up the scenes he was going to paint in advance). His compositions recall theatrical mise-en-scènes, appropriate for a front view from the inside of a cube.

In his later videos he also does not include data from reality. Thus, reproduction is no longer documental, witnessed. On the contrary, his photographs and videos have, under a cold, mechanic, neutral view, a contained albeit strong expressive load. His photography translates a zone of his memory. In fact, “the partial eclipse that prevails … is the direct result of cancelling the common ground, historic specificity, however connected to a specific story the images may be. (This connection is more and more elusive until … it becomes a general allusion to lost childhood, to loss in general).” The thing is, if photography is generally considered a medium for memory, and video, a medium for the present, it is surely possible to introduce memory into moving images.

Furthermore, Fabra is also interested in the theme of military camouflage, i.e., soldiers and armaments mimicking their surrounding, so that they become invisible to the aerial surveillance of their enemies. A technique whose history is in the history of art. Dalí assured that the camouflage of World War I was fundamentally cubist and Picassan, whereas that of World War II was surrealist and Dalinian. It is camouflage, but, at the same time, a symbol of primitive man.

The photographs in the series Gilberto’s Place would make one think of self-portraits, but, not being that, allow the artist to distance himself from the scene. They are, shall we say, disquieting, tragic scenes of violence and death. Gilberto’s Place 1 was, surely, taken within a garage. And that is not a mere coincidence. That is the place where objects and weapons in the hands of people are born and die. And, according to a hypothesis shared by Arthur C. Danto, from the arsenal of the garage came all the iconography of North American pop art. This garage invites the spectator to extrapolate his/her image of the wars on Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq. The character photographed presents as camouflage a pile of greenery on his body. However, this Nordic garage is perfectly tidy, and the rolls of wire are rolls of industrial wire, not barbed wire.

Thus, Fabra accentuates the tension. Gilberto’s Place 2 is a scenography that recalls clandestine burials in the times of the dictatorship, the digging in search of those missing, with cypresses to one side of the photograph—probably taken in the plant beds of Rodó park, in central Montevideo. This brings to memory a mountain in the shape of an eagle, a painting by Magritte, The Domain of Arnheim, based on a short story by Edgar Allan Poe.

In Gilberto’s Place 3, Fabra assimilates tales of torture in the picture of a flayed body, which recalls Vesalius’ anatomical theater (16th century), in which a group of students study the anatomy of a gutted man.

The art of Juan-Pedro Fabra Guemberena is that of a Latino based in a Nordic nation, the country of Ingmar Bergman, living with the demons, the Nordic ghosts, with the anti-Mediterranean.

The images he creates express the same terrors announced by the sculptures of German gothic cathedrals. They may be the projection of the infant world of suffering he had to live (exile, expulsion, separation from his mother). All his projects, confesses the artist, “revolve around something very personal”: from a childhood marked by tales of terror, by a kind of theater of cruelty, and not precisely by fairytales.

Ángel Kalenberg (Montevideo, Uruguay, 1936) is a researcher, art curator, and art critic. He managed the Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales for thirty-seven years. Curator of selections of Uruguayan artists sent to the biennials of São Paulo, Venice, and Paris, he was also responsible for the Latin American selection for the 10th Biennale de Paris and was a member of the International Committee of the 17th Bienal de São Paulo. He was vice president of the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art (CIMAM) and also participated in the Aica – International Association of Art Critics. Among other books, in 1991 he published Arte uruguayo y otros, in which he brought together texts printed over twenty years of work as an art critic, and collaborated in The Dictionary of Art, published in London in 1996. In 2000, he was appointed correspondent member of the Brazilian Art Critics Association.

(1) Walter Benjamin, “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Schocken Books Inc., New York, 1969.