Ruben Gutiérrez

Forzar la puerta del presente
February 2, 2022

FORCING THE DOOR OF THE PRESENT is an invitation to try to react and feel alive in a world full of anxiety and depression due to the absence of meaning. Two mechanical balls converse as they roll endlessly on the gray floor of a gallery while an exhibition setup is paused and no one is watching. The film of just over 14 minutes is made under the mold of the filmed diary of experimental filmmakers such as Jonas Mekas or contemporary video artists such as Oliver Payne and Nick Relph, but Gutiérrez chose to carry out his piece under an animist fiction where the objects and elements of the natural world are endowed with movement, life, soul and self-awareness. Using a pair of mechanized balls and voice-over, Gutierrez tours an empty gallery, unfolding a conversation around the anxieties of the contemporary world with the tone of a meditation session. Gutiérrez once again applies the hard-learned lesson: the need to make something out of nothing. As the driving force behind “ONF” (objectnotfound.org) as well as an artist, writer, and film director, Gutiérrez has mastered the art of finding and retrieving ideas in the cultural desert.

The exhibition includes other pieces such as a series of drawings from a notebook, made with pencil and blue pen that display phrases that invite us to reflect on the absence of representation, the drawing as the original work of art, and about possible hidden meanings. A phrase escapes from the paper and unfolds in a white neon that subtly illuminates the empty space where an imaginary sculpture is located in the tradition of artists such as Maurizio Cattelan and Tom Friedman. In this piece, a certain post-situationist trace is perceived that accompanies us during these journeys between objects and narrative, where emotional fragility is expressed in the intensity of the lines of the script and of the drawings. A few lines that invite the viewer to fill in the gaps between the pieces and the texts by Rubén Gutiérrez with their own imagination.

Jiao P'eng, Paris. 2022