| As I have already written previously, I have been expressing through my works the daily subjects that afflict me conceptual and ideologically. It was like this with the series "1984 - George Orwell's Stigma", "Brave New World" and "Seattle Project", among other, where I used pieces of computers and commonplace objects incorporated to the traditional technique of oil painting. In that way, the reason of existence of this exhibition could not be different. Since the 80's, when analyzing the human attitudes in our time and trying to understand its trajectory through comparisons with the past, I came across to a strong parallel in history: the Middle Age. The whole violence sense, insecurity, solitude, social despair, risks of epidemics, religious control, professional relationships, space displacement, the government's dependence, social injustices, personal anguishes etc., that happen nowadays, have, in my point of view, certain similarity with that historical period. From there it was born this new series of works "Brave New Middle Age", where the major intention is to provoke, in the spectator, reflections on the present and future using the experiences of the past in an approaching similar to the cyclical continuum space time, although I imagine that the time should not be represented exactly by a circle, but for a spiral (that has some characteristic apparently cyclical), because it is born in a point, it grows always passing by the same quadrants that provoke certain similarities continually even so without repeating, being, because of that, much more dynamics, as it is the life. Returning to the historical parallel mentioned previously, we know that in the Middle Age, the displacement of the people from an area to another was very slow, because the faster mean of transportation was accomplished through horses. Today the speed of the displacement in the great cities arrives to the same parameters of the Middle Age due to the traffic jam (inside of the cities, we delay the same time, as in the past, to move ourselves 20 kilometers, for example). With the progress of the computer science, many liberal professionals and executives have been maintaining their offices at home and they use electronic means to send their services to the companies. In the same way, in the Middle Age, there were people that hired the artisans' services leaving the raw material at their houses and periodically passed in their homes to take the finished product. In the Middle Age, there was also an informal structure of trade, and now, the informal economy is coming strong in the great cities, where, many managers take raw material and remove goods manufactured by people hired to accomplish those services in its own houses. In the Middle Age, the cities were surrounded by high walls and gates, that were closed at night, in order to protect against external attacks. Archers were put in those walls to watch possible enemies' approach. As a parallel, we have today, closed condominiums or even commercial and residential areas, where watchmen's companies are contracted with the same formerly purpose. In the Middle Age, the roads were also extremely dangerous as the crossings of streets are, in the great cities nowadays. The risk of serious epidemics is increasing in our days, worrying the world sanitary authorities, due the facility which the viruses and bacterias can be transmitted. This has been generating the same concerns that there was in the Middle Age with the plagues. As well as in the Middle Age, the cities today are true centers of new ideas, technologies and power, where the rulers are generally prepotents and stay isolated of the population that hopes the governors solve the community's problems. The labyrinthian formation of the streets in slums and poor areas does not differ of the dwelling conditions in the Middle Age, where the basic sanitation was precarious. Besides, the dissemination and the manipulation of the religions today, has not been very different from the religious manipulation of the Middle Age. In the same way, the proximity of the end of the millennium has been creating some catastrophic forecasts, similar to the one of the end of the first millennium, associated to the of the end of the world. However, the Middle Age was not exactly an era of obscurantism as many think and, perhaps, our age is not also as black as some pessimists divulge. In that sense, many believe that we are in the threshold of a new age that, perhaps, do not delay the same time that Renaissance delayed to arrive, since everything has been developing and modified with extreme speed in our times (probably, it happened more significant events in this century than in the whole history of the humanity). With all this, the "New Middle Age" that we are living today, in spite of its dichotomies, seems to me so admirable as the one lived by our ancestors, and this encouraged me to continue expressing my disillusions and hopes through the logical and joyful reutilization of technological residues of our days opposed to representative elements of the Middle Age. When respecting, in the series Brave New Middle Age, the persistent recurrence in the use of some symbolic elements, such as the image of the planet Earth, seeds and leaves, as well as ballet dancers images, used in another series of works, I try to express the situation of the man's existential unbalance before the planet, nowadays, besides creating an analogy, through the counterpoint, with elements that refer to the Middle Age. The constructivist composition of the pictures which begins with the Golden Section used in its dimensions, generates the creation of pictorial plans gotten through textures and overlays of paint in sneezed and wrinkled layers, and abstract and gestured brushstrokes. Even so, those rigid geometric plans are attenuated with the use of the elegant and organic lines of the logarithmic spiral (for me associated to the rhythm of the life and of the time) and with the use of chromatic harmonies resultant of extensive research on the color and that help the spectator to travel by the pictorial surface of each work. The outcome, I believe, it is formed by non conventional contemporary pictorial works, where the symbolic universe exercises great visual force in the spectator. October/1998 Walter L. L. Miranda Back to texts |
 |