Magazine 32 (EN), Stories (EN)

Alexis Pantoja

Fictions of Reality

By Liannys Lisset Peña Rodríguez

We believe that just by looking at Alexis Pantoja’s paintings we will know how to name everything we see; what we read in “the visible”. Before them everything must seem ostensible and discerned: it is that confidence, Didi-Huberman argues, in the “adaequatio rei et intellectus” which is nothing more than the omnitraductibility of images. With that certainty of assured semiotics, Pantoja manages to keep his representations on that dangerous edge that, according to Fernando Castro, separates and brings into contact the marvelous and the banal; it is at the limit that the singular emerges, where the glow of pleasure and the vibration of the concept are not antagonistic. 

“Everything begins” in the idea; the one that emerges before, even before the image, in that interval of danger where it disappears or can remain forever. Then the manual gesture: building the support, stapling it to the wooden structure, ready to print on it the solutions and let the pigment slide without the setback of porosity. Then he abandons himself to drawing: trial and error where the form emerges, breaking through the line of emptiness. To finally conceive the scene: a kind of preconceived structure, which the artist manipulates as it materializes. 

To appreciate the mystery of these images implies not reading or explaining them, but observing them. They question the visible, with the manipulation of pictorial structures and levels; they generate conflicts in the fragile border between reality and fiction. The scenes are created from a subtle irony, provoking the viewer. Everything is interconnected through objects and characters that seem harmless and generate “surprising” effects in our visual perception and incite multiple ruptures in their traditional functionality and influence within the scene. Freed from its real condition, the archetype expands outside the “common sense”, to generate an absurd and symbolic visuality; which is built on the basis of uncomfortable metaphors that break the usual logic; and affect the cognitive uses of understanding and construction of meanings by the viewer. 

More than paintings, they are thought-images, by virtue of which the art of painting is the art of thinking. One notices the presence of that pathos that forms continuous relations of association “without limits” of the real-fictional. The rhetorical figures insist on the exploration of unknown resources and the inexhaustible creative capacity of visual language: metaphors, paradoxes, oxymorons, similes, as well as the transitional elements: windows, doors, boats, waters work as mediating resources in a visual argument that likes displacements and breaks, in order to obtain representations where the gaze has to think differently than usual and stimulate critical thinking. It is also in the absurd, the metaphysical symbolism, and a certain play with Magritte’s allegorical planes, together with the marvelous real where this complex scenario “out of context” is sustained, with the purpose of strangeness or the sensation of “the hidden”.

The artist tries to put the viewer in the situation of constantly tracing a different route, one that guides him or her towards a possible answer about reality: a type of image, as Hans Belting points out, that goes beyond a product of perception; it is the result of both personal and collective symbolization.

Pantoja incites to fabulation, until the emergence of the true scene, in which the sky and the waters participate as unfathomable spaces; the human as anthropological speculation; the environment as a theatrical object; but all taken out of context: he approaches its formal nature from the descriptive way, which captures the closed objectivity of meaning and immediate identification; and the allegorical through the image and its multiple possibilities, incoherencies and capacity of semiotic association.

The (non)relationship with an unsuspected space activates the reflexive mechanism. This doubt in the face of the illogical-correspondence between context-object-subject, produces a clash between two realities: that of the work in its representation and that of the subject himself who contemplates the image. In them, both the immediate and the transcendental levels sustain this sense of estrangement. They are subjective epics in which he treats the universe in his own way; or annotations as a treasure chest of his visions, or the opportunity to explore the limits between reality and fiction. His imaginative and profound worldview allows us to share his experience of the visible.

They are “images that demand to be looked at”; that do not hide their traditional nature, they are a canvas, a painting. We are before a simulation that reminds us that the world that is constructed in the pictorial corresponds totally to fiction. It also shows us the usual route of painting, that which David Barro points out we may have forgotten: its complexity, the intervention of the hand, the gesture, the physicality of the pictorial gesture. Works, as Magritte said: like traps to catch glances. It is enough to look for it in one of its points to see it disappear. Beauty imposes itself in a pictorial touch or a light, indescribable, gesticulating drawing feature; it is precisely she who opens that window to the marvelous; she traces the spaces and enhances the encounter that symbolically marks the route of what she saves: painting.

Alexis Pantoja
Alexis Pantoja
Alexis Pantoja
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