Sara Milkes Espinosa

 

Think Pink is a personal confirmation of the fact that, in spite of the many theoretical contradictions associated to contemporary art, it is not possible to stop making it.

 

This installation, composed of paintings, drawings and sculptures, comes from the necessity of providing a physical response to the continuous crisis in art students and artists’ minds: ¿why should we keep making art?

 

In this project, subjects such as political art are addressed through the use of images that contain a heavy political charge, questioning the viewer about the effects these images are intended to have on a given audience. The Mono Jojoy’s picture, which morbidly exhibits his watery internal explosion, is the clearest local example. As a matter of fact, the military authorities and the media, ignoring the negative connotation of distributing images of violence and death, exhibited the apocaliptic pictures of the guerrilla leader’s corpse, as a means of humiliating the enemy, an act as impulsive as showing the neighboring feudal lord’s head on a spike.

Additionally, these images question our socially constructed precepts about morality and consequently about our cultural identity (I consider necessary to mention the not so uncommon fanaticism for gore images or the simple interrogation about the biological origins of our attraction to morbid images and the role it plays in survival).

 

Besides questioning the effectiveness of political art, Think Pink faces a charge more autochthonous to Latin American art: the need of asking local artists why, even though it is a “criollo” cultural product, image production is still partly dependent on purely occidental media such as oil paint. This reflection is executed through three topics that are interweaved aesthetically: the use of a group of visual conventions of Candy confectionary and pastry-making, the use of oil paint as a plastic matter, and shit (a recurrent icon  in the politically correct artistic-punk rebellion).

All this conflict, ironically  is unchained in an abundant artistic production, thus giving a  clear answer to the initial question: ¿and how to stop making it?