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USELESS LANDSCAPES

Syd Krochmalny solo show at Gallery 50 inc, New Jersey, November 2017

Living multiple lives, adopting roles with determination and enthusiasm and  adhering to different genres and classes, can advance the story of one’s existence in a contradictory way. This wide possibility to develop as humans has transformed the world into a fairly schizophrenic place. It only takes seeing how the left votes to the right to realize that. An artist can be an activist, a sociologist, an objectively subjectivist poet, a writer without boundaries, a digital sculptor, a professor, an editor and proprietor of magazines, an author of books which require field work as a stripper, and obviously a delicate painter and musician.

 

This is the case of Syd Krochmalny, who over the last few years has developed several professions with a superior grace.  Like every true artist, deep down he seems to care more that his ideas are done nicely than doing them technically. Taking off your pants or writing papers for the University, articles for magazines and newspapers, are not just ways of working for him, they are also things that have an aesthetic dimension.

 

Since Kant philosophy has been responsible for trying to understand and give some meaning to something as incomprehensible to us as art and have written a lot of horrible books that Krochmalny has read carefully.  But his influences seem to be further from classics such as The Critique of Judgment or Letters for the Aesthetic Education of Man and closer to a Maradonian inspiration.

 

In Argentina, there is a great philosopher who made many contributions to aesthetics, he is like Nick Land for us, someone quite controversial who does really beautiful things and is able to get along with kings and punks; although in reality it would be blasphemous to try to compare it with any mortal being.  Diego Armando Maradona, for example, is known as "El Diego", "Pelusa" or “D10s”, each one of those names corresponds to one of its mutations or roles.

 

The Chavist regime, Versace shirts, the tattoos of Che Guevara and post-truth are some of the productions that pay tribute to this Maradonian aesthetic that may need a much more extensive text to be developed. Briefly stating these ideas here, gives the reader enough to understand this multiple existence.  By observing these ‘Useless Landscapes’, painted more with the hand of God than with that of a mortal, or the sculptures printed with machines that look like candies of some icons in the history of art of the last century, shows us that order is not the natural law that rules the universe, but the excess rules the universe.

By Mario Scorzelli

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