PRESENTATION: José Montealegre-Nervous System
In his sculptures and installations Montealegre creates fictional worlds that are informed by his interest in subjects such as archaeology, philoso-phy and science fiction. By thoughtfully combining and layering certain aspects related to these interests, the artist offers the viewer an inhabited and inhabitable environment that is deliberately designed to encourage emotional, intellectual and physical involvement.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Kölnischer Kunstverein Archive
In his first institutional solo exhibition “Nervous System”, José Montealegre continues his ongoing series of works from 2020 titled “Páginas”. The starting point for these sculptures is an extensive botanical archive of plant illustrations created in the course of the Spanish colonization of Mexico and published as Nova Plantarum Animalium et Mineralium Mexicanorum (1628). The archive saw the catalogization and re-systematization of hundreds of indigenous plants by the colonizers. In rich detail, Montealegre translates these botanical illustrations into copper sculptures and presents them on the second floor of the Kunstverein. In his artistic practice, which also includes writing, the artist tells stories that blur the line between origin and (mis)translation. Contrary to knowledge shaped by colonial powers, Montealegre allows marginalized perspectives to emerge thus challenging canonical history(ies). In May 2020 the artist downloaded a digital copy of the Nova Plantarum Animalium et Mineralium Mexicanorum (1628) from Biodiversitylibrary.org to a thumb drive. Then he took that thumb drive to a student printer. There he printed it in black and white on recycled paper. Leather bound front cover and all. The 1,104-page stack of documents has hundreds of drawings of plants and animals found in present day Mexico and Central America. Each drawing is accompanied by a Nahuatl name that has been scattered by the empires and a Latin name that has been reinterpreted by modern botany. Since printing this version of the ‘Nova Plantarum’ José Montealegre have been going through the book almost every day. He look at the plants and sometimes, recognize them instantly. Other times it takes his months to realize that he have seen them in the past, but most remain unknown to him. Familiar only through these drawings, he sees faint possibilities in the landscape. The worlds of Montealegre mutate with ease. In the works hanging from the walls—some with scribbles, others lined, many with glass tile floors, and all manufactured, disguised, drawn, and at the same time, empty—the page functions as a metonymy for space. His temporal worlds become sheets of paper. The variations between the works coalesce in their recreation of a notebook’s structural features. Through their size and visual references, they flirt with being lost pages from a sketchbook that documents and externalizes the inner-workings of the artist. Reality informs how we narrate and create. Small flowers curl out of a copper spiral and the outline of a nose peeks above a plastered surface. These notebook pages have translucent glass floors. Elsewhere the tiles lose their transparency, suggesting that what we see and not see is not always all there is. The background has been in fact obscured by dense graphite strokes. The glass lets light flow through, but only to instantiate the impossibility of unmediated reality. What operates under the sign of the tangible is revealed as fate and consequence of deceit. Such repeated and promiscuous translations between worlds constitute the slyness of his deceptions. Not only is art itself duplicitous, but also the materials, forms and contents of reality itself. A stellar organism seen from an inhuman distance or the lost pages of a journal intimate the horizons of deceit.
Photo: José Montealegre, Tainting the well, 2022. Installation view Kölnischer Kunstverein, 2022. Courtesy: the artist and Mountains-Berlin. Photo: Mareike Tocha
Info: Kölnischer Kunstverein, Hahnenstraße 6, 50667 Cologne, Germany, Duration: 20/8-16/10/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, https://koelnischerkunstverein.de/
