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Useless Landscapes

Painted songs, acrylic on canvas, 78x68 inches, 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

Art Postcapitalist

Paintings, acrylic on canvas, 78x68 inches, 2017.

Yellow Stakhanov Will Hit Florida Keys

 

"We must bear in mind that the struggle is one for an ideal: that of the culture of brotherhood and complete freedom; of victory over the individualism which cripples human beings; and of a communal life based not on compulsion and the need of man to herd together for mere self-preservation, as it was in the past, but on a free and natural merging of personalities into super-personal entities." So said Anatoly Lunacharsky in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, to whose centenarium we assist in the form of a parodic litany about the efforts and decadence of an over-productive, exalted individual who struggles with the ocean of professional opportunity and possibility. Yoga, the Zodiac, malls and art fairs form the moral landscape of this unbalanced figure whose output is a cautionary tale about speed, resolution, anxiety and fear. It has been said that late capitalism resembles Stalinism in everything but common sense. An artist mostly recognized for his collaborations in Buenos Aires' artistic milieu, Krochmalny's recent pieces tell the story of those communal ideals bowing down under a hurricane--of the Lunacharskian super-personal dismantling and giving place to a figure old and new: Stakhanov as a solo artist.

 

Claudio Iglesias

TTheoretical PaintingsloThe del sitio

Paintings, 78x68 inches, 2016-2017

The Language Of The Stones

12 songs, and painting (acrylic on canvas, 78x68 inches, 2017).

Homenage and Oblivion

8 3D printed sculptures, plastic and resing, diamater: 18-22 inches

The hand and 3D technology are different forms of magic that summon dreams in the form of imagery. This fog consolidates in the plane or in the space, but always offers the illusion of the being, that inevitably is constituted by infinite layers of memory.  In this way, the collapsed constructions of post-capitalism, the threats of global destruction, the fantasies about the efficacy of art and the unrecognizable landscapes, appear in fragments in the art of the icons of the last century: the Italian, Amedeo Modigliani, the Argentine, Lino Enea Spilimbergo and in the Americans, like Paul McCarthy, Matthew Barney and Bruce Nauman. The sculptures, presented brilliantly like a fake luxury goods, just as common commodities are produced to attract attention with their color and shine, portray a human quality which demands reflection. 

By Roberto Jacoby

New Art Critic

The Museum of Contemporary Art of Buenos Aires (MACBA) and the Center for Artistic Research (CIA) presented its Jornadas de la Nueva Critica, which took place from August 24 to 27 (2017) in the museum.

Directed and curated by Syd Krochmalny and Jimena Ferreiro

General Coordination: Sasha Hrycaniuk and Eliana Zanini

Speakers: Catalina Arzani por Melina Ruiz Natali, Federico Baeza, Osvaldo Baigorria, Florencia Battiti, Catalina Berarducci, Guadalupe Chirotarrab, Adrián Cangi, Cajita, Fernando Davis, Valentín Demarco, Fernando Farina, José Fernández Vega, Daniel Gigena, Andrea Giunta, Verónica Gómez, Horacio González, Carlos Huffmann, Claudio Iglesias, Laura Isola, Roberto Jacoby, Gerardo Jorge, Inés Katzenstein, Silvio Lang, Juan Laxagueborde, Agus Leal, Fabián Lebenglik, Martín Legón, Mariano López Seoane, Guadalupe Maradei, Lara Marmor, Daniel Molina, Leticia Obeid, Lucrecia Palacios, Cecilia Palmeiro, Cecilia Pavón, Mercedes Pérez Bergliaffa, Alejo Ponce de León, Florencia, Qualina, Nancy Rojas, Lucas Rubinch, Ariel Schettini, Mario Scorzelli, Marita Soto y Julia Villaro.

The writing of the present: art magazine exhibition.

 

Mancilla. Editors: Magdalena Demarco, Carlos Gradín, Juan Laxagueborde, Nicolás Maidana y Florencia Minici. Santiago Villanueva, Fermín Álvarez Ruiz y Cecilia Eraso.

Jennifer. Editors: Claudio Iglesias, Syd Krochmalny. Production: Marucki Novaki.

Revista BOBA. Editors: Alicia Valente, Cecilia Cappannini, Chempes Saurio, Dani Lorenzo, Marina Panfili, Matías David López, Verónica Capasso.

El Flasherito. Editors: Andrés Aizicovich, Liv Schulman y Leopoldo Estol.

Otra Parte. Directors: Graciela Speranza y Marcelo Cohen. Editor: Federico Baeza.

Revista CIA. Editor: Syd Krochmalny. Edition: Carolina Muzi y Kiwi Sainz.

Jaque al arte. Editor: Cristina Civale