ON MY OWN
BilbaoArte. From January 31sth to March 28th, Bilbao.
Manu Arregui (1970) uses his modest PC to produce all his work. He has specialised in 3-D digital modelling, a field perhaps more associated with video games and the entertainment industry of Hollywood, two crucial fields for the transmission of ideals to younger sectors. Even before he had gained the confidence of a gallery (he was recently signed up by the Espacio Mínimo Gallery, Madrid, one of the most interesting on the current panorama), he had already "hung" works of art on his magnificent website at www.manuarregui.com, thus forming part of the network of alternative relationships that have sprung up around Internet over the past few years.
"The unstoppable development of the leisure industry in our society is very significant. The recent popularity of computer science has permitted some of us artists to use sophisticated production and broadcasting tools that were only accessible to powerful companies until very recently. The power of seduction exercised by these new media is such that the average observer, who is not necessarily trained in contemporary plastic art and who uses Internet as an easy and comfortable way in which to access culture, becomes fascinated and emotionally involved".
Arregui states his intentions quite clearly on his website: his aim is to use the love/hate relationship he maintains with genres and artists upon which present culture is founded to play with them, with special emphasis on elements coming from the gay culture. The use of strategies belonging more characteristically to publicity and the mixture of styles are constants regarding this artist. Pop music and video clips, "B" series horror films, Japanese Manga cartoons and drawings or references to such classics as Bergman and Bacon all unashamedly converge in the peculiar language the author has developed in order to express his complex interior world.
In his videos and photographs, disguised under the seductive aspect of being sophisticated, leading edge leisure articles, the author invites us to travel through the darkest corners of our minds: ghosts and childhoodtraumas, adolescence and "moral contamination", the most absurd things in the world and the monstrosity into which human cruelty can convert itself, love, or lack of it, incommunication and individualism, sex and death as enigmatic, irreversible and traumatic facts. The author invites us to reconsider important topics and think about them ironically and insolently using characters that appear to "descend" into a subterranean world populated by their fears and in which tensions between innocence and violence, the illusion of a child and the desperation of adult life are always palpable.
In BilboArte, Manu Arregui presents "On my Own", an installation comprising of three simultaneous videotape projections that the artist has conceived "site specifically" for the BilboArte Centre. In the first part of the installation, a character with enormous eyes scrutinises visitors, just like Warhol's screen tests used to do, inviting us to question ourselves about our inner worlds. In the second, a character multiplied into infinity forms a group of clones that suddenly fall to the ground, mown down by shots that seem to come from nowhere, action as precise as a minutely choreographed display of ballet. In the third part, the group of clones holding branches in their hands dances in circles. There is something behind the character of "On My Own" that is deeply disturbing, a shadow that accompanies and obsesses it, producing grief and terror. The lack of answers to metaphysical questions, the existential anguish due to the doubts concerning the artist's uncertainty of the final destination of human beings, the permanent quest for evidence that would give existence a sense of transcendence. The character of the exhibition is deeply disturbing. However, as the three projections interact, so the installation gradually produces an even more devastating effect on us. Time and time again, those characters appearing in the vast majority of Manu Arregui's works are speared and transfixed by the very roads they journey down. They are paths that writhe and twist back on themselves, placing travellers face to face with their own souls, their very own consciences. They are intimate, enigmatic journeys that overwhelm spectators, transporting them to a strictly personal and deeply disturbing state that becomes increasingly worse as the characters making their journeys are gradually weighed down by a dense drama, one that implies baring the human soul in a generic way.
Xabier Arakistain. Exhibition curator.
