The tragicomedy of living in this world, made into an exhibition

LisbonThe first work, direct and challenging, already sets the tone for the exhibition. It is a large photograph by Antoni Muntadas of a Titanlux advertisement where one can read: "Painting is easy. Do it yourself!" It was 1989 and the Barcelona-born artist, provocatively, was already placing the artistic painter on the same level as the industrial painter to criticize the consumerist drift of society and pose a conflict: what will become of art when culture broadens its borders to the point of futility and the capacity for reproduction of art devalues the value of originality?

Almost forty years later, artist and art curator João Maria Gusmão recovers that work and extends its critique to the present day, through about forty works from the contemporary art collection of the Fundació La Caixa. The exhibition, aptly titled Painting is easy. Do it yourself!, located in the main gallery of the impressive Gulbenkian Modern Art Center in Lisbon, will be open until February 8th and for now, it is not planned to tour the state's CaixaForum centers.

João Maria Gusmão explores contemporary "tragicomedy" through art: comedy in appearance, tragedy at heart. "Tragicomedy is funny, but at the same time it is not funny at all," he states. Because, although the curator plays at inventing recipes so that each visitor can make their own works of art at home –"how to make an Antoni Muntadas?", "how to make a Gerhard Richter?"–, deep down he defends "the irreproducible reproducibility of the works," he asserts. The exhibition offers a framework "of paradoxes, of ambiguities, of polysemy" for the spectator to create their own narrative. "The artist should not tell people what they must think, that is coercive and paternalistic –says Gusmão–. Art is important, but not in a direct way; it should not generate debate but rather affect the sensibility in a more transcendent way. If art has value, it is because it stands at the margins of meaning," the Portuguese artist opines.

The acceleration of crises

If nearly forty years ago Muntadas's work perhaps contemplated the impact that media such as television and photography would have on creativity and subjectivity, today the expansion of forms of communication, with the internet, social media, and artificial intelligence, has only served to accentuate those doubts: consumerism, copying, mass reproduction, banality. For Gusmão, "art that has meaning must be above all of this". Muntadas, by the way, remains very active, and will participate in the Lagos Biennial, from November 14 to December 6.

The exhibition offers an unprecedented look at the extensive collection of the Fundació La Caixa. "It's unrecognizable!", celebrates Nimfa Bisbe, director of the culture department. The Foundation has four active exhibitions of its contemporary art holdings –which since the 80s have come to gather more than a thousand works– in Barcelona, Rome, Basel, and Lisbon, and the one in Lisbon is probably the most unique, because it is the result of giving carte blanche to an artist.

The first pieces in the show highlight above all construction materials, stone, plastic, and wood. There are the enormous granite stones by Giovanni Anselmo, the glass man by Belén Uriel, one of the characteristic works by Ángela de la Cruz that look like the remains of scaffolding canvas, a cement arch by Cristina Iglesias, or the two tires portrayed by Christopher Williams. One of the central pieces is the installation by Damián Ortega Nine types of terrain, which consists of nine projectors where brick constructions appear falling like dominoes, in a collective collapse that may have parallels with humanity.

The works also pass through the industrial art of Peter Halley and the experimental cinema of Michael Snow, which turns a 30-second farewell from work into a pictorial work of nearly twenty minutes. And it offers a phantasmagorical vision of the world through the large empty frames by Thomas Schütte and the color projection by João Maria Gusmão himself.

The exhibition becomes most poignant when it delves into the critique of consumer society and the corporate logic that was already present in Muntadas' work. This is evident in the painting where Rogelio López Cuenca has turned the Pepsi logo into "proletarian poetry" or in the work by Andreas Slominski, in which a bicycle carries bags and bags of plastic, just as homeless people carry their homes on their backs. The difficulty of access to housing, a completely current debate, is present through the apartment created by Martí Anson with wood in 2002. And it is more extreme than ever: if 25 years ago a 25 m² apartment was a social critique and a vindication of humble aesthetics, today it is a reality in our gentrified cities that makes the crisis even more evident. "The works precipitate meanings that their own authors could not have foreseen," states the curator. There is also the 60 m² curtain by Belén Rodríguez that emulates a swimming pool, Pool, and which today is a canvas that would not fit spread out in most urban homes.

There is no doubt that João Maria Gusmão has a pessimistic view of the future of humanity: "There is no optimism, no; nor is there any possibility that art has any meaning," concludes the curator.