OH! SWEET NUTHIN ́

Ariadna Ramoneti

The second individual exhibition by Aldo Chaparro in the Galería OMR, with unpublished works based on the interaction between the mediums of paint and sculpture with that of industrial design, music, architecture and publicity. In them, the artist speculates over the originality within art through the appropriation of phrases and ideas developed by distinct actors in recent media culture.

Following this idea, during the last years Aldo Chaparro (Lima, Peru, 1965) has worked on pieces based on texts and phrases where he looks to avoid a specific interpretation to allude to the void of meanings in contemporary culture. As portrayed in the expressions “Diet Coke & Cigarettes” and “Oh! Sweet Nuthin´“ (a saying taken from a song by The Velvet Underground song, which also ends up being the title for the show), the meaning – practically nonexistent – of textual fragments, acquires relevancy when its reproduced on a monumental scale with materials such as steel and wood, adjudicating a lasting quality to a phrase or to a set of words which would commonly pass unnoticed, transforming at the same time the written word as an object.

Another thematic axis that Chaparro approaches are the direct references to other contemporary artists such as Robert Indiana, Sol LeWitt, Richard Prince and Mark di Suvero. By ironizing and playing with the expressed ideas in the works of these 21st century icons, transforming the visual imaginary in texts that activate our memory through the form itself. Such as the case with the piece  “Richard Prince´s  Brooke Shields”, a sculpture which makes reference to, without even having it present, the controversial image of 1982 in which the Hollywood actress appears posing nude when she was 10 years old. Like this, the artist ‘quotes’ those who precede to give a place to a radical, honest open questioning about originality and appropriation in the current practice of contemporary art.

Inside the context of this exhibition pieces are presented by the artist in which he makes obvious the idea of the gesture as a result of an action, where he descontructs the meaning of the artwork by modifying the form again and again; transforming the lyrics of a song in a poster, extruding the typography of the poster into sculpture, painting or also mural, questioning the traditional order of the artistic production. With the exhibition OH! SWEET NUTHIN’, Chaparro, who is also the director of the magazine Celeste, looks to dissolve the limits between art and mass culture to pose, through language and memory, works that redefine our collective imagination.