ALDO CHAPARRO – VANISHING ACT

Jesús Alcaide

Denial of the past as something we can return to, and the melancholy or longing for a future unlike any- thing we had imagined, are among the emotions expressed by Aldo Chaparro Winder (Perú, 1965) in this collection of photographs, entitled Vanishing Act.

The time mood represented in this series calls to mind such films as the Disney science fiction film “Tron” and Stanley Kubrick’s “2001”, or electronic music groups like Kraftwerk, as well as a certain perversion of classic minimalism, caused by the artist’s use of neon lights and his references to pop music (Velvet Underground, Nina Simone or Lou Reed) – proving Paul Virilio’s statement that “art does not speak of the past, nor does it represent the future; it becomes the privileged instrument of the present and of simulta- neity”.

In this game of temporal shifts, where time is no longer progression or evolution, but a rhizome of refer- ences waiting for the artist to remix and scratch, Aldo Chaparro borrows Lou Reed’s song title in order to evoke, by means of fluorescent lines and lights on a black background, the beginnings of technology, those years in the 1980s when electronic music sounded like Jean Michel Jarre and our desires were writ- ten in green on the black of our first Mac’s.

With this group of photographs, a video projection is also shown, a version of an installation presented last year at his Escape exhibition, composed of LEDs that appear from a crack in the wall, flashing to a Gorka Alda melody. For Vanishing Act, the crack has become the outer limit of the work and we can now see its interior. The video shows us a space composed of flashes on shiny surfaces, creating a varied ar- ray of lights and sounds. The sound accompanying the piece is a reinterpretation by Eduardo Lopez of a melody by Wendy Carlos.

FIFI GALLERY September 2009, NY