Alejandro Goldschwartz exhibits in Buenos Aires, Argentina

The painter exhibits his most recent works at the Palermo H Gallery. In this interview, he reflects on his aesthetic search and the relationship with art in our time.

Mar 27, 2023

Alejandro Goldschwartz's exhibition can be visited until April 2

If you had to describe the exposure, what would you say as a common factor? How would you describe it in general?

It is a varied sample, the work of the last five years. But if there is something in common in all the paintings, it is some reference to symbolic violence and not so symbolic in the relationship with the female figure coming from almost 15 centuries of the weight of the institutional religion. I question and parry the idea of an anthropomorphic god creator of the universe. I think it's like believing that babies are brought by the stork from Paris. That idea of absolute truth is what ends up generating a totalitarian thought, whose first victim is the woman. You just have to look at Genesis, where all the descendants of Adam and Eve are born in sin and the culprit of course is Eve.

Faced with that, I propose a reassessment of the myth of the birth of Venus, and of Greek thought in general, a critical review of the male-female bond and how a religious culture from which we have not even remotely freed ourselves influences this. But this gives to extend more than we can here.

The paintings do not go unnoticed. Are they baroque? are they pop? Are they surreal?

-Well. What I want is to be a synthesis of figurative painting. Combine the composition and a certain baroque theme with modern images of Pop culture. It is a way of establishing a kind of continuity with the historical.

The artist with the public, on the day of the opening of the exhibition

There is a religious line. Is it parodic or admiring?

The two things. Admiration of the compositions, parodic with the established religion, especially with the Catholic Church, with the virgins of the status quo. There is also a series with the expulsion from paradise. But there is also a cosmological look. Because what I want is to question monotheism and generate and propose a new mythology, or rather, a new way of thinking about the mythical. I'm interested in trying to imagine how the pre-Socratic Greeks conceived life.

Aren't there too many women in your work?

-ToO much compared to what? How much is too much? I paint Aphrodite, beauty and love. I am interested in the myth of the birth of Venus and I propose a new birth. There are several paintings of mine that are not only new versions of the birth of Venus, but reformulations of the myth.

In one of my paintings, Aphrodite is not born from the genitals of Uranus but is summoned by Hermes and Dionysius, which symbolize conscious and rational thinking and the debauchery of the impulsive, together both with the Carites, which are the three thanks. That is not only a merely aesthetic search: it proposes a reformulation of love and the look on women.

But other titles also refer to psychoanalysis.

Yes, I am totally Freudian. What I paint are not object women because they are symbolic women. What I paint are representations of male desire, or perhaps, of my own desire, so as not to generalize.

On the other hand, my paintings are epiphanies, they are visions, insights that are then elaborated and are made in the likeness of the Freudian unconscious, that is, they are multidetermined, because there is a great variety of influence in my thinking and built through condensation and displacement. Condensation of elements from different periods of painting and elements that are apparently not related but in the painting they are, and displacement because each icon or each quote or each character refers to another or a certain concept. For example, if I paint Innocent X, I am painting a perfect painting by Velázquez, whom I quote with absolute admiration and without any irony, but that character is a representation of the Catholic Church, of the decadence of the Church, of a certain corruption. Personally, I'm not very interested in explaining the pictures because then it's like they give you chewed food.

The artist describes his creative work as the condensation and displacement of elements from different eras of painting

In other words, you point to each participant in your expo drawing their own conclusions, having their own thinking or, at least, not having too much influence over it with your art...

Not exactly. What I intend is that the viewer, after the first impact of the visual image, which is the aesthetic one, when he tries to decipher what I mean, feels that the picture is like an equation that asks to be resolved by understanding, but that does not end up happening. What I intend is that you feel that there is always an indecipherable area, because that is what takes you beyond the search for meaning. I think that's the function of art, to make you go beyond the need for everything to have an explanation. I would say that "the trees" of logic don't let you see "the forest" of the work.

If you had to describe yourself within a line, a school, how would you do it? How would you define yourself?

I think each painter discovered his vocation by seeing some painting that dazzled him. I feel a huge admiration for Baroque painters, but also for the avant-gardes of the twentieth century. And I want to think that my work is linked to a tradition of figurative painting, which does not deprive itself of recognizing its influences.

Your art, it could be said, seeks a certain discomfort in which it contemplates it, it wants to generate a need to process that information at the same time that there is an aesthetic...

I don't make a decorative art, which doesn't mean that I don't seek to create beauty, but I want it to be a convulsive beauty, as André Breton asked. I want to generate an uncomfortable beauty, through images that go well into the eye, because the compositions and the making of the painting are quite classic, but the themes are a little twisted and the reading of the painting is never linear.

Well, I couldn't help but feel challenged by the paintings, as if there were a scene that has to be deciphered.

The idea is that true art is something that borders the limits of that for which there is no explanation or there are no words to define it. When you see some paintings that generate a feeling between pleasant and uncomfortable, we can think that it approaches true art, which generates a kind of ambivalence between pleasure and discomfort, and should put you in a kind of emotional / intellectual short circuit. And you have to be the one who deciphers the work, the author doesn't have to explain it to you

The definition of baroque pop closes me but aren't they a little looking at the past?

The question is interesting, and the answer is complex. The answer is that yes, there is a look into the past that I want to rescue. First, I think that the rebellion against academic beauty has already been experienced throughout the twentieth century, from the first avant-garde, and in my opinion, the search for painting, as a form of painting, that is, the creation of new styles, is exhausted. And if it's not exhausted, the results are superficial. Painters currently considered, or successful in terms of popularity, are frankly frivolous. So for me, painting with an important intention of creating beauty is a form of rebellion against the enormous amount of mediocre art that exists today.

You are very hard on this concept. What art do you rescue from that mediocrity and in any case, why do you think this situation has been reached?

On the other hand, I think that the conceptual for the conceptual itself is not only that it is exhausted as a search but in general apparently important works are generated whose conceptual load is frankly superficial, which are apparently striking but that do not say much, and that in general, are at the service of an economically powerful but culturally and intellectually mediocre elite that is the one that manages the aesthetic criteria As Marx said, the dominant aesthetic values are those of the ruling class.

Alejandro Goldschwartz

I see that your work has an apparent narrative intention, which however is somewhat cryptic.

I am interested in creating a spatial, aesthetic, non-linear reading discourse, that is, that it cannot be easily translated into words. I am interested in the viewer feeling the difficulty of "explaining" the painting, because that will take him further in his interrogation of the work because he will feel questioned. The work is presented as an enigma to be deciphered. It has something to communicate, but it has to be deciphered.

The idea is that the significant chain, that is, the attempt to explain the work, reaches a kind of dead end, which will cause it to generate some discomfort and the viewer can go on to have an experience of visual condensation that renounces to "understand", because my work is aimed at the unconscious, to mobilize the sensations that the composition and known images generate in emotion. The paintings can generate a certain anguish or be a path to a certain aesthetic ecstasy if you cross the barrier of the desire to understand.

-That is, in a way, despite the certain complexity of the work, you are targeting all kinds of audience at the expo, if you appeal to the public, in the background, to renounce "understand"...

On the one hand, honestly, I paint for myself. Art is a way of self-knowledge. As Picasso said, art is a lie to get to the truth. It is a game in which elements of interiority are revealed that are not expressed in words. And to the extent that unknown elements are revealed to myself, I feel that there is some universality in them and it is only there that the viewer enters. I don't paint for a particular audience. But there is a conception of the world and of being expressed in my painting, and sometimes I am on both sides of the counter, because there are paintings that only after having painted them, I realized what I was saying. And it is in that sense that art is a way of knowledge, when it surprises even the artist himself.

*The exhibition can be visited until April 2 at the Palermo H Gallery (Tucumán 712, CABA).