RAY SMITH: UNGUERNICA by Stux Gallery

RAY SMITH UNGUERNICA

+HALLER

RAY SMITH U N G U E R N I C A

RAY SMITH UNGUERNICA

Stux + Haller Gallery, New York 27 April - 28 May, 2016

GUERNICA’S SHRAPNEL DANIELLA HANSEN

In this Unguernica series, Ray Smith is ultimately

A critique of war echoing into our 21st century,

interested in the “undoing of the undoing” – a

the tapestry reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica

translation of Picasso’s disintegrating forms.

was long exhibited at the UN, serving as the

What follows are revelatory meditations on this

backdrop for speakers at the central podium. In

undulating language of bodies and objects.

February

Ray Smith: Unguernica Drawings at Stux + Haller Gallery includes works exhibited in 2013 at the Picasso

Foundation,

Museo

Casa

Natal,

2003,

opaque

blue

curtain

shrouded it when then-Secretary of State Colin Powell gave his address advocating for the invasion of Iraq.

Picasso’s childhood home-turned-museum in

In witness of the startling hypocrisy of such an

Málaga. Recently brought back from Spain, the

act, Smith was spurred into motion. In this

drawings are being shown here for the first

show we see the results of this UNguernica

time in the United States. Accompanying the

speech, an archive of society’s continual march

series of drawings is a selection of paintings

into war against reason.

from Smith’s expansive thirteen-year project, Unguernica.

The resulting figures are striking – surreal, yet familiar; alien, yet intensely human. Guernica’s

Smith uses the visual language of the Surrealist

silent scream is contorted, morphed into

parlor game Cadavres Exquises, or the Exquisite

shrapnel, and sent hurtling back to us 79 years

Corpse, to summon creatures made of shards

after the fact.

of the victims in Guernica. In the game, each artist draws upon a folded segment of paper, and only at the end is the entire page revealed. Smith and his assistants transformed this game to work for them, whether on paper or panels of wood. By using this “game,” the artist tricks and blinds himself.

The

anxiety

when

unfolding

Unguernica is reportedly palpable, yet giddily so. In this way, Smith, a brilliant visual interpreter, allows us a peek into Picasso’s eccentricities while remaining firmly entrenched in his own style and voice.

Portrait of Ray Smith

INTRODUCTION Unguernica at the Fundación Picasso, Museo Casa Natal

JOSÉ MARIA LUNA AGUILAR Some time ago, Professor Robert Rosenblum said that Picasso “was a cannibal. He devoured and digested the masters.” 1 We know all too well his “homages” to Velázquez, Ingres, Rembrandt, Brueghel ... If this is true – and it is – it is no less true that there are countless artists who, over the years, have looked to Picasso and his work. And even today, long after his death, his paintings, prints, ceramics and sculptures continue to generate curiosity among the most current artists. That is to say, now other cannibals have devoured the cannibal. His work serves as fodder for others like him, who use the masters’ world of images as a starting point to produce new images: totally different, absolutely new. The appropriation of recognizable images – unique and representative of Art History – and their manipulation and reinterpretation transforms them into new allegories. In the words of Maurizio Vitta, “the image is not defined by what it is, but by that to which it refers, its model, against which, however, it can reveal itself only as an enigmatic reflection. Consequently, it is itself, but only to the extent that is presents itself as something different.”2 In the early eighties, New York produced an interesting movement that returned to painting, back to the image and its tremendous narrative potential in an effort to overcome the severity of Minimalism and Conceptual Art’s offerings. Essential to this process is the strategy of appropriation, closely linked to the theory of the image that understands every image as a section of reality, which is composed of elements grouped into different structures of representation. Ray Smith – through his revisionist and deconstructionist intervention, working in a mode that is so closely linked, in a certain way, to surrealism – participates in this line of work of appropriation, tinged with his particular “apologetic

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1

Aguilar, Andrea. “Rosenblum descubre al Picasso conservador,” El País, July 11, 2006. 2 Vitta, Maurizio. El sistema de las imágenes. Estética de las representaciones cotidianas. Barcelona, Paidós. (2003)!

and mestizo” character. He deconstructs and analytically dismantles what is undoubtedly Picasso’s most unique and emblematic work. He fixes his gaze onto this monumental work after the deep impact of the well-known chain of events and terrible consequences of 9/11. Once the original image is taken apart, he reassembles the different parts, usually as horizontal stripes in the manner of an exquisite corpse, so that fragments of the “revisited” work rarely match up. But the artist also uses “homegrown fragments” in these “reconstructions” to give the image a new, bonus meaning, which adds to the work’s semantic weight and intentionality. It is this revisiting of Picasso's work that brings Ray Smith to the birthplace of Guernica’s author. With this exhibition – and shows of this type – we continue a program that, since its founding, has connected the Picasso Foundation, Museo Casa Natal to contemporary art’s offerings. It makes perfect sense that Picasso’s Casa Natal would connect with contemporary proposals that push the limits of traditional modes of representation, as he did throughout his life. Thanks to the collaboration of Ivan de la Torre and Juan Ramón RodriguezMateo, to whom you add Ray Smith’s generosity, collector Mario Padilla’s willingness, and Alvaro Alcazar Gallery – to whom I cannot stop conveying our heartfelt gratitude – we are presenting some of the most outstanding works of Unguernica, as we celebrate the 132nd anniversary of Picasso’s birth, Rosenblum’s notable cannibal.

José Maria Luna Aguilar is the director of the Fundacion Picasso, Museo Casa Natal – the museum located in Picasso’s childhood home in Málaga, Spain.

UNGUERNICA Drawings & Paintings

Unguernica II-38