Jonathan Hammer / VENT IT!

Opening: Thersday September 17th 2009 / 20-24h
Exhibition: from September 17th till November 21st 2009

Hammerheads

Fucares Gallery is proud to present the fourth individual exhibition in our Gallery of Madrid by the artist Jonathan Hammer (Chicago, 1960)

One has to imagine it happened. Of course it happened. When and where are irrelevant. Here’s the image: the kids are chasing him and screaming in their sing song voices “hammerhead! Hammerhead!” Thus, the two oversized water-colors of shark heads titled, “Endangered” and “Endangered Upside Down” in Jonathan Hammer’s fourth solo exhibition at Galeria Fucares in Madrid, surely reference an on going and well known part of his work. Take for example: “Self-portrait as Dancing Oyster”, “Self-portrait as Lobster Claw”, or “The Roasted Poet”. In these drawings, the focal point is the artist’s capacity to reflect that which he encounters: to “be” the mirror. Not a distorting fun-house mirror. Rather it is society which, vice versa deforms the image in the mirror, a conglomerate image of fear and desire, of the sacred and taboo, of idolatry and iconoclastic fantasies which come to define the figure of the artist as a mirror that is flawed and amiss. This is the notion that gave shape to Hammer’s large and ghostly installation of toy roly-poly sculptures made in porcelain. With their worrisome gaze, molded and pushed softly inside the white, immaculate and absentminded faces, these sculptures (the size of a 9 year old – perhaps the same boy being chased – Hammerhead!) are an overwhelming receptacle of frailty and bravery. Like the drawings in the Fucares show, “Mid”, “Denunciation”, this surrogate toy is speechless and soulless, but he always stands up again no matter the fear, always ready to confront those who have pushed him.

The question that remains is one of aesthetics. How does the artist choose which “reflected” image to freeze-frame and appropriate? And this is one of the absolute strengths and specificities of Jonathan Hammer’s work. At the same time as fully acknowledging and integrating the historiography of Western Art, its legacy and its form, he daringly refuses to forgo the context of contemporary culture. The richness and delicacy of the two shark heads, their texture and iridescence, the depth of their palette, the tortured fragility and complexity of their modeling bares strong witness to this integration of European art history and contemporary art concerns. Hammer resuscitates and recreates the notion of the “beautiful monster”, an idea on which much of late 19th century and early 20th century art is built, from Symbolism to Art Nouveau and beyond. The watercolors become the artifact, the ornament as objectified as a Tiffany Jewel or a Lalique vase. Hammer, who lives in Barcelona, has clearly absorbed the aesthetics from some of the Modernist masterpieces. His work does not shy away from transforming the most misshapen of visions with a quality of precious beauty that is certainly one of the most controversial and provocative of current trends in contemporary thought.

But it goes farther. Hammer’s Spanish sojourn continues as a central theme in this exhibition specifically through the two leather screens titled “TILT/LILT”, and “BLOW”. The references are clearly to Don Quixote and in a broader sense to Hammer’s relation with books and literary configurations (in a sense: figures of speech) that have been present in his work from the beginning. Don Quixote is mad from books. His narrative is an imaginary travel, built page by page on the foundation of this insanity. Cervantes projects the story forward, Don Quixote’s miserable body fueled by nothing but the wind of his locura. Like the title of Hammer’s exhibition, Don Quixote does little more than VENT IT! He confronts the world of wind, with more wind. And Hammer’s screens are also invaded by books, shifting both in structure (literally by folding), while also doubling as “paravent”, furniture that stops the wind. In terms of imagery they shift as well. His visual narrative is expressed by the syntax of “anacoluthon” and “syncopation”. “BLOW” and “TILT/LILT” reinvent the dream-hero, the Don Quixote creature, by making him a “hero of our time”. The screens are not a commentary on Cervantes and even less illustrations of the book, they are projections, as is common in Hammer’s method, of the protagonist/artist as shape-shifter. The windmills encounter the anatomical parts of the body. The pineal eye (the stone of folly in El Bosco’s famous painting in the Prado) takes the shape of an exploding bomb thrown under the wheels of a carriage – but which carriage?

In Hammer’s leather work the “inside” world meets the “outside”. The skin is turned inside-out. The microcosm melts, merges, mixes and permeates with the macrocosm. The entire “experience” of the universe becomes a gigantic organ. The dismembered body is recomposed and multiplied both literally by the use of skins as well as rhetorically. Described by Deleuze and Guattary in their famous book Milles Plateaux, we have here “the body without organs”. We have in Hammer’s work a place where the shape of the world reinvents the central collapse of the self-identity.

It is not then, so surprising that Hammer’s work uses as rare a media as leather (the two works are a collage, or marquetery of the most exquisite and exotic skins, using techniques of fine bookbinding, referenced in the form itself of the two folding halves). The skin is, after all, the body’s limit, a turning point, the moment of inversion and reflection, the point of contact with the world. At the skin, shapes can fold, unfold and combine, configure and disfigure themselves in an endless exploration of visual palindrome forming both body and person. But the leather also introduces in the work a dimension of vacillation: the most precious and vulnerable of materials, taken from the life and carrying the death shadow sublimated in color and texture, with which we wear the world. Shakespeare’s famous “pound of flesh” to pay off the debt. As the French writer Andre Gide wrote so ironically, “The deepest part is the skin”: well, one has to agree after seeing the present exhibition.

F. B.