ROCK MY ILLUSION

Jesús Alcaide

The melancholic rhythm of cymbals accompanied the cold and distant voice of Nico in one of Warhol’s favorite songs. I’ll be your mirror, reflect what you are. Let me be your eyes, a hand in the darkness, so you won’t be afraid. When you think the night has seen your mind, let me stand to show that you are blind, please put your hands down ‘cause I see you.

The title of this song comes from the first album by The Velvet Underground, the well known Banana album that becomes useful for Aldo Chaparro in order to establish a melancholic reflection about the gaze and identity in an installation that, running away from the asepsis of a minimalist such as Lawrence Weiner, expands towards more sculptural territories where the signifier and the meaning collide and hide behind each other in a search for the impossibility of recognition from the other in its totality.

I’ll be your mirror, but stained by black paint. I’ll be your mirror, but you will only know a part of me, that which I want to reflect in you, that part of you which I also am. I’ll be your mirror, but be careful with what you see.

Along with his work as an editor for independent magazines in Mexico such as Celeste, Wow, Om, Chivas, Baby Baby Baby, Cuaderno Celeste and No Ficción, Aldo Chaparro develops in parallel an interesting visual corpus of work in which he combines his interest for an expansion and redefinition of sculpture united to word games and references with iconic visuals from the art world and contemporary culture. An example can be seen from the reinterpretation of Robert Indiana’s piece, LOVE, which Chaparro converts into TABÚ and PUTA, in a game that follows those already begun by other artists such as ACT UP being converted into AIDS or Marc Bijl into PORN, or even designs in album covers such as Rage Against The Machine who changed the LOVE of Indiana into the fight, RIOT.

From those interferences with the audiovisual world of contemporary culture, in an interesting (in)disciplinary displacement, Chaparro has used the references from the rock and roll sphere in some installations and editions in which he utilizes the phrase “I FEEL SO EXTRAORDINARY” from the song True Faith by New Order which was presented in ARCO 2007.

I’ll be your mirror, reflect what you are in case you don’t know. I’ll be the wind, the rain and the sunset. The light in your door to show that you’re home.

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