The past is never dead. It's not even past. This infamous William Faulkner quote, borrowed for the title of Carlos Castro Arias' exhibition, reflects both the artist's and the writer's beliefs in the enduring significance of history and how it continues to exert its influence on the present.
Faulkner's motto also perfectly resumes the research of the Bogota-born, San Diego-based conceptual multimedia artist Carlos Castro Arias, who has built a distinctive practice for over twenty years. He employs through different media a "cynical aesthetics" (Michel Onfray) that projects a skeptical perspective on culture, art, and societal norms.
Castro Arias short-circuits heterogeneous elements to create a morbid kaleidoscope of references, which hybridizes past and present, cultured and popular, myth and reality, sacred and profane. This approach also engages with an "archaeological approach to the present" (Giorgio Agamben), interpreted as a way of quoting the past to question the present. A strategy the artist adopts to examine how historical events and ideas have shaped the Colombian political and social landscape.
Castro Arias often evokes traditional artistic genres connected to the Western art historical tradition, like tapestry, commemorative painting, and sculpture. He subverts the linguistic codes of his aristocratic historical references to narrate the contradictions and vulgarity of the present, underlining, with an attitude suspended between humor and cynicism, Colombian society's paradoxes, myths, and rites.
Is history really a "teacher of life", as Cicero's famous saying would suggest, or rather a teacher of doubt? What significance can we attribute to knowledge of the past? Can we attribute a cognitive value to history, which can help us better understand the present? The artist's answer to these thorny issues throughout the show is to explore divergent narratives, recuperating ignored or suppressed elements in historical and official accounts.
Eugenio Viola and Juaniko Moreno
Curators