Tan pronto, tan posible

Curated by Mercedes Reátegui
(Download Press Release)

On blue plains untouched by time, it is possible to discern traces of human activity. These traces, which seem to allude to a process of spatial terraforming, indicate a certain inclination towards an aesthetic of archaeological futurity. To create his paintings, John Huamani starts from Google Earth images of a cement factory located in Villa María del Triunfo: a periurban industrial site closed to the public, but inspectable through “open access” virtual platforms. In his small-format paintings, the artist starts from architectural renderings of shopping centers located in the outskirts of the city —images recovered from the facades of construction sites and the media that advertise them— and creates nocturnal portraits of the structures. The architectural perspectives with two vanishing points, the enhancement of the constructive volumes, and the abstraction of the building with respect to the urban are representational strategies of modern architecture that Huamani transfers to his paintings. An artificial light allows us to glimpse unoccupied interiors and a dimmed glow warns of the desolate environment surrounding shopping malls. The disturbing disappearance of social life in highly crowded places finds a parallel in the disappearance of the past —as experience and as visibility— in a piece that shows a monument barely perceptible in the darkness of the night. Huamani takes as a reference a public monument erected in memory of the armed conflict previously located between the districts of Villa María del Triunfo and Villa el Salvador, which was demolished irregularly and during the early hours of the morning by the municipal administration in power.

The myth of urban renewal unfolds in Huamani’s work as a popular consciousness inhabited by power, organizing the production of space and the popular sociability of the areas of urban expansion that emerged as a result of the internal migrations of the 20th century. According to Danilo Martuccelli, a worldview increasingly oriented towards a dominant regulatory project that regulates various aspects of the social and political life of the city. Huamani uses artistic methods to recognize the logics of privatization, speculation, and land use that are imprinted on the subjective experience of the urban. Through urban and virtual drifts, as well as explorations around the commodified circulation of architectural images (“utopian” images, after all), the works allow a reflection on the experience of spatial and temporal fragmentation —specific forms of abstraction of urban space— that complicate the cognitive insertion of the subject in the “new Limas.”

Beyond playing with different formal aspects of the city’s infrastructure, the works gathered together can be interpreted as instances of desires crossed and conflicted by a horizon of implacable liberalization and a deep-rooted process of erasure of national memory. What is erected from this is a city where the past has been eliminated and the uncontrolled orientation of capital establishes its own forms of abstraction and simulation; scenes where the social agreement is erased, replaced by extensions of eroded land and places of hyper-consumption confined in a temporal limbo. Through successive experiments on urban space, Huamani’s work allows us to reflect on the fantasies of the “frictionless” interconnection of the urbanization of capital, as well as on the enigmatic form that these fantasies take in figuration.

— Mercedes Reátiegui