Gallery 44, Beyond Love and Democracy and Ricardo Cuevas

I paid a random visit to Richmond 401 last week on Thursday (November 3rd), hoping to see some new shows. Luckily, I stumbled upon the new exhibitions that had opened the very same day at Gallery 44. Peter Freitag's private stages is shown in the project room, and D. Bradley Muir's Dreams for Sale is installed in the vitrines section. But the main gallery is reserved for Ricardo Cuevas' Beyond Love and Democracy, which interested me the most.

Cuevas, born in Mexico City in 1978, is an emerging international artist whose work revolves around issues like "selection, framing, index, document and archive", as it is described in the exhibition booklet. After having his work shown in several group exhibitions in USA and in Europe, he had his first personal exhibition, People Are Afraid of Contemporary Art. What They Don't Know is That Contemporary Art is Also Afraid of People at the Banff Centre for the Arts in 2003.

Cuevas' works are playful, but in their playfulness, they challenge the viewer in unexpected ways. The first piece that one experiences upon entering the gallery is Walking with the Ghost, which sets the tone for the rest of the show. Encased in a glass container, the work consists of a large book made of unexposed photographic paper. At first, I failed to see the point, but then I realized that this state of confusion was the point of the artist. By creating something that seems meaningless at first sight, Cuevas makes the viewer drop his guard. Only after this challenging moment one realizes that if the book is opened, the content would be lost instantly.

This is not to say that Cuevas' approach always works. Another piece, entitled Understanding, confused me to such a point that I wasn't able to overcome the artist's challenge and apprehend its meaning. However, in two photographic series that form the main body of his work, Cuevas uses his playful style to engage the viewer about the medium itself.

The first series of photographs are called One Day in a Perfect Dark Room. These large sized black and white digital prints are the results of a collaborative project created with blind people. Once again starting from a seemingly absurd point of view, Cuevas replaces the photographer with a blind person. Thus, the images reflect the use of sounds, smells, and most importantly, memory, in order to depict what the photographer cannot see, but what he knows to be there. One Day in a Perfect Dark Room is challenging not only because it takes away the most basic element from photography, but also because it makes the viewer aware of the possibility of sightlessness. This is especially poignant in our modern culture, where sight is valued above every other sense.

The second series, entitled Blackout in the National Gallery, is similar in its interest in the medium, but in this case, Cuevas is directed towards the image creation process in the visual arts tradition. Large sized reproductions of famous paintings are printed in black and white, but they are overexposed to such a point that all one can see are the outlines of the image; the rest is blacked out. Following Walter Benjamin's ideas on the results of mechanical reproduction, Blackout in the National Gallery offers a clever comment on the state of the visual art culture today, where no image can maintain its so-called aura.

Cuevas' playful and engaging photographs are one of the most interesting works I have seen in the recent months. The simplicity of his approach, and the amount of different meanings one can see in his work create a contrast that I enjoyed very much.