Video – Aldo Chaparro

Idea – Materia – Tiempo

2020

Video

1:32 minutos

Abandonar La Técnica

2020

Video

1:32 minutos

Sonido y Silencio

2020

Video

1:08 minutos

Demoler

video

1:43 minutos

Gael Carmona

2015

In 2015, Public Art Projects invited me to participate in a collective show in a big old house in Mexico City. The project was defined by the fact that the house would be demolished a few days after the end of the exhibition. My pieces were three stainless steel sheets, just like the ones I usually bend and wrinkle with my hands and my body to make my series of wrinkled steels, but for this project I simply nailed the flat sheets to the walls of the house. The plan was to let the demolition happen with them inside. This way the house would become an extension of my traditional process and my own strength would be replaced by the strength of the house falling on the steel. A few weeks later I was informed that the tip of one of the sheets had been found among the rubble. We dug it out with shovels and picks. We only found this one piece of a sheet. The fallen house had left its marks on it and radically transformed it in such a different way from how I do it with my body.

Ensō

2008

Video

2:57 minutos

Ensō is based on the act of joining extremities to transform a shape into a circle. Just like the lines on the ensō, the transformation makes lines meet and unite with itself perpetually. Any ending or beginning taken away, only its being remains present. The process of creating gives way to self knowledge, which is precisely what ensō represents. Lines go further than form in order to capture moments.

Human Disco Ball

2000

Video

00:50 minutos

Construcción 1

2000

Video

00:55 minutos

Andador 20

1999

Video

1:27 minutos

Estudio

1997-1999

Video

2:30 minutos

FLYING OBJECTS (OBJETOS VOLADORES)

1999

Video

0:34 minutos

This video is a collaboration with Alejandro Rosso, in those years Alejandro and I had formed a band called Solomon Medrano in memory of a drunkard who drove his van from a nearby ranch all the way to Monterrey and ran over several cyclists during an international cycling event.

The images correspond to spheres located in different areas of the city used to highlight electric cables. During those months, my video camera got damaged, which resulted on videos with a very particular pixelation. As I loved the way it pixelated the images, I never repaired it. This piece was the first one I recorded with the camera’s flaw.

FLYING OBJECTS

Solomon Medrano.

Video: Aldo Chaparro

Audio: Alejandro rosso

1999

Urban Shelter

1998

Video

1:37 minutos

TALLAS (CARVINGS)

1987 – 1998

TALLA I

1998

Video

11:54 minutos

TALLA II

1998

Video

1:31 minutos

TALLA III

1998

Video

1:37 minutos

The three carving videos were created around 1987, TALLA 1 and TALLA 2 were shown in Fluo, a solo show I had with Ramis Barquet, which also was the last solo show I did during those years in Monterrey. TALLA 3 was part of the Femsa Biennial in 1998. The installation consisted of a table with books from my father’s library that had been wildly attacked by moths. I saw the insect’s path through the book pages as a negative form, which became evident when I browsed rapidly through the pages. The video of this action was reproduced on a monitor above the books. Just like Talla 1 and 2, Talla 3 speaks a little about a topic that has always interested me: the relationship between positive and negative spaces.

John Cage said that music was the result of the relationship between sound and silence. Just like silence, the volumes around us are defined by the relationship between solid and void. It is the balance of both what defines form in the real world. For the Chinese, a cup isn’t defined by it’s matter, but by it’s capacity to hold. Containers need emptiness to hold, hence, gaps and voids define form.

After WWII, when Europe was facing a tremendous loss of humanity, two artists were highly promoted; Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. A common characteristic in them were that holes went across their forms. These holes alluded to an interior, which in a way represented the soul. The soul was what everyone in those moments felt obliged to talk about.

In the specific case of my carving videos, which represent my first thoughts on this subject, seek in some way to create a similar feeling to the one caused by the Tibetan mandalas. In that way, the apparent nonsense of eliminating the object makes sense as the process is praised. Carving a piece of wood to the point where the objectives isn’t finding a shape inside the block, but a process of reduction that will end with the material. In the same way, the pencil sharpener devouring the pencil emphasizes the reductive process of carving, converting solid into void, while propping up the most important parts of art: the process, the experience, and just like mandalas, the present moment.