PSJM takes its 'American Democracy' to Los Angeles
- Kayla Broberg
- Jun 23, 2022
- 2 min read
Cynthia Viera from Gran Canaria and Pablo San José from Asturias star in this solo show in the United States until May 21
CANARY ISLANDS7 The Gran Canarian palms '
Friday, April 15, 2022, 02:00
American Democracy' is a large installation made up of 59 historical paintings: a pictorial portrait of the political history of the United States interpreted in a geometric key. With this new project, the group
PSJM - Cynthia Viera from Gran Canaria and Pablo San José from Asturias- continues the development of its own language within the field of abstraction, a line that the group has called "social geometry" in which geometric compositions are generated from statistical data or scrutiny.
The solo exhibition opened its doors yesterday at the Building Bridges Art Exchange in Santa Monica (Los Angeles)where it will be exhibited until May 21. The title of the work gives meaning to abstraction, a critical content that perverts the very tradition of formalist painting. The raw material processed by the knowledge society is information, and this is precisely what underlies the plastic strategy of "social geometry"where computer graphics and the tradition of American color field painting are combined with sociological study to offer critical reflection.
Carrying out this project entails a rigorous research on presidential elections throughout United States history. A nation that was founded as a democracy and that has been maintained in this way uninterrupted over time. "This fact provides us with a privileged timeline that crystallizes in a large installation that allows us to visually show the fluctuations of a democratic system," point out this couple of artists.
From this panoramic view, several interesting readings emerge. In the tasks of interpreting data and applying distinctive colors, the first element that surprises from a European perspective is the assignment of color to each political option, which appears as arbitrary and diametrically opposed to what is conventionally used in Europe.
Since 2000, the American mass media began to associate the color red with the Republican Party. —despite being a conservative party— and the color blue to the Democratic Party, considered center-left. As a result of this association made by the media, the parties definitively adopted this color code.
Perhaps the most direct reading that can be made when facing this installation is the clear tendency towards bipartisanship and polarization. The project has the support of the Culture Ministry, from Spanish Cultural Action of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and of the program CanariasCrea of the Government of the Canary Islands.
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