Japan, Korea, Taiwan, an imaginary homeland: it is for the non-upper-class youth what Paris or New York was for the elite. A cultural dream in which they combine narrative fantasy (manga, anime), entertainment (video games), cuisine, and fashion. A space in which they recognise themselves and which expands the possibilities of their bodies, of their language. "La Abuela" Jiles[1] knew it when she ran in Congress as Naruto; Auntie Pikachu[2] always knew it, to the point of exhaustion. This vast Asian continent appears as a place where millenary tradition and cutting-edge technology come together to create fantasies or nightmares in which the monsters and gods of pop mythology roam. A new religion.
There are the groups of young boys and girls who learn the choreographies of K-pop with devotion and exemplary dedication; there are the parades of cosplayers; there are the amateur mangakas, the collectors of figurines, the nostalgics of Osamu Tezuka.
Daniel Guajardo's paintings play on this court, but they are the work of a fan, not a believer. There is the attentiveness of the visual anthropologist and the boldness of the painter who manipulates his objects of study in search of an image. He is ready to disrupt the museum of the video game in pursuit of his pictorial pleasures. Unknown Pleasures, as Joy Division would say. To read the cards of Super Mario or other video game characters as a memory of an era - the eighties - that, from a distance, seems like the lost paradise of childhood fantasy. Digital sadness in low definition. But the artist is far from this. These works are based on a series of mistakes, plagiarisms and misunderstandings, chosen with irony and pleasure. If they were to be classified in a literary genre, they would be critical essays, and cultural chronicles rather than melancholy poems. Chronicles of the 21st century, written before the obsolete digital horizon of a lost childhood. I correct myself, a childhood that never existed. And one of the artist's inspirations is a game that never existed in the eighties or the decade that followed, but which nevertheless phagocytizes the ingenuity of those years: Somari.
Video games - probably one of the biggest businesses of the 20th and 21st centuries - have created a narrative and technological subculture of unprecedented scope. This is where the artist's vision comes in. A game console, the PolyStation, appears as the epitome of piracy. Paraphrasing the name PlayStation (in a strategy that dozens of Chinese companies from the most diverse sectors have adopted), the console reproduced - in 8 bits - hundreds, if not thousands of games for users who wanted to relive past experiences under new visual and narrative keys; from plagiarism to recreation, and from there to a terrain that seems parodic and metalinguistic. The best example of this, and the greatest inspiration for this project, is Somari, a narrative fusion and apocope of Super Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog. A dirty, royalty-free crossover. An example of what creativity can do when it gets rid of copyright and freely fuses other people's ideas to unleash the eternal fantasy of what if? All the screenwriters who have brought Superman and Batman, Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four together in one story know it. A nerd fantasy.
Painted in oil - and with Chinese oils, as the artist likes to point out - these paintings live in a pleasant ambiguity. They recreate, with all the freedom of the pictorial medium, a digital universe that seems primitive today. The 8 bits to which all the games referred to by the painter are reduced become a formal key that seems synthetic and even abstract when compared with the modern technology that covers all the games on the market today. They were and are also an academy, a place of learning that offers several representation models. "Painting and repainting this imaginary is an exercise related to copying what we see when we want to learn to draw. The image calls to us, and we want to reach it. The first attempt to access the world of images is through reproduction, copying cartoons, copying comics or video games; it is a creative principle to also create new worlds from what we have observed," says the artist.
The high definition of games such as League of Legends or Fortnite is a hyper-real world in which textures, atmospheres and surfaces make a pact with reality, transforming it into a universe in which everything looks more realistic. Today's players can manipulate and construct the environment in which armed characters roam at will in a fraction of a second.
Against this backdrop, the 8 bits offer a minimalist reduction, a Mondrianesque universe, as if it were possible to completely transform reality based on a technical criterion of minimalist order. Less is not more, but the difference. The 8 bits, like the Lego bricks, take abstract ingenuity to the extreme, dealing with reality - simplifying it - to the point of transforming it into a landscape. One of the landscapes alluded to here is that of Somari, which the artist interprets as a simile of the local landscape: "I feel that they are, in a way, a representation of the landscape of Chile. The blue sky, the snow-capped mountain range and a palm tree always burst into the scene. The game levels always include elements such as mountains, caves, water... elements that are prominent in our landscape". Somari is for Guajardo as the Los Andes matchbox[3] was for artists like Truffa or Cabezas[4]. Pocket-sized nostalgia.
It is precisely the voids and the distorting geometries offered by the views chosen by the painter - in multiple screenshots - that allow him to develop a formal game in which the paint unfolds with total freedom on the canvas. It is not constrained by mimetic desires or the corseted limits of masking tape. Far from reproducing his references with painstaking fidelity, Guajardo prefers distortion, the permanent contamination of the material that inspires him. A participating observer. These can be inserts from other games or successive layers of stains that blur, ambiguous and strange the universe originally referenced. Oil paint is the material that, like a thick mud, carries the characters to the point of impossibility. Mario and his adventures take place in an environment that owes as much to expressionist abstraction and its codified graphics as to the low-resolution technology - always pirated - that the artist alludes to in each of his paintings. "It's no crime to steal from a thief", the saying goes.
Parody and sensitive tribute to a culture - Latin American - where piracy, if not theft, has been the method of access to capitalist modernity that is distant, if not impossible, in many contexts of our continent and our country. Meiggs[5] turned into Chinatown. It is precisely this impossibility of access that becomes witty cleverness. Guajardo appropriates these references of Asian origin, allowing himself to be surprised by the images as the painter that he is, but also making a series of sociological notes. A travelling painter of a territory whose borders are the vast spaces of the Internet and perhaps the more accessible territories of the bazaars[6] scattered around the peripheries of Santiago. His work is, therefore, a visual and social cartography. He paints not only the players' fantasies but also offers us a part of their environment. The whole can be read as an 8-bit description of what has characterised our Latin American societies throughout the 20th century and even into the 21st: a cunning and precarious imitation of worlds as desirable as they are inaccessible.
Guajardo's aesthetic is a tribute to all those tendencies that have worked from reality and filtered it. Without going back too far, it was perhaps the language of the Pointillists, led by Seurat, that inaugurated - in Modernity - practices that filtered the observed reality through an aesthetic constructed from scientific paradigms. In this case, the multiple theories of colour developed throughout the 19th century. The Pointillists inaugurated a way of interpreting reality through filters that could now be described as technological. It is this imposed, anticipated language that ends up defining an entire aesthetic, as would later happen with Lichtenstein, Chuck Close, and all those artists who, in one way or another, respond to the stimuli of mechanical or, as is the case today, digital reproduction. Guajardo uses 8 bits to create a free, stylised interpretation of his models. His works are distributed on screens that do not respond to the proportions of video games or domestic screens. On the contrary, he plays with the medium in a relationship reminiscent of modern painting. Paradoxically, it is a kind of Matissean formalism that speculates with pictorial planes, the dilution of surface and matter, to vibrate aesthetically and pictorially from a false, banal referent.
The world of video games and their false reminiscence of the eighties or nineties acts here as a metaphor for our cultural consumption and our confused relationship with the past. These paintings do not represent a faithful recreation of the games that those who lived through those decades might have experienced at Delta 1[7] or in any arcade. What there is, then, is an alternative way of representing and tracing the contours of an era and a culture in perpetual negotiation. An era that is constantly redrawn in the minds of those who lived through it and of the many who can only imagine it through products that turn it into a Neverland, an electronic Eden where neither Pinochet's dictatorship nor political struggles nor the vulgarity of everyday life have a place. Instead, there is the Flashdance glow of neon lights, electronic screens, and small pocket consoles, all promising a pleasure that is dreamed of as endless, like the extended childhood of so many young people who approach adulthood with their Naruto backpacks, their kawaii tattoos and their baroque cosplay outfits.
César Gabler, artist and curator.
June 2024.
[1] Chilean congresswoman Pamela Jiles, self-styled as “La Abuela” [The Granny].
[2] Giovanna Grandón, member of Chile's 2021 Constituent Convention, publicly known for dancing inside a Pikachu costume during the 2019 protests.
[3] Los Andes is a Chilean brand of matches, whose traditional box depicting the snowed Andes mountains has been a staple in Chilean culture for a century.
[4] Chilean artists Bruna Truffa and Rodrigo Cabezas.
[5] A commercial area in Santiago with wholesalers of products from China.
[6] Locally known as mercados persas [lit. Persian markets], markets in Chile where a wide variety of items, both new and second-hand, are sold at a lower price than in commercial establishments.
[7] A popular arcade and pinball hall in Santiago in the 1980s.
