Kevin Simón Mancera: Imperfect Reality
Kevin Simón Mancera is a 31 year old artist from Columbia, who has exhibited his own work and been active in a curatorial capacity since his early 20s in 2004. He received his MFA from the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano in Bogotá in 2007, has had artist and curatorial residencies in Brazil and Spain respectively, and has shown with Nueveochenta Gallery since 2008.
I recently encountered a monumental piece by Mancera at the 2013 Pinta Art Fair in New York. The work was titled The New York Times and is made up of 24 individually hand-drawn posters in black or white background, featuring reverse-type text also rendered by hand. Each individual poster features a headline from the actual New York Times newspaper with the corresponding date of the issue in which it ran. All of the selected headlines are negative in content, from “A Glide Path to Ruin” to “A Roar, then Blackness: ‘I Have Lost Everything,’” referencing specific disasters of various sorts, be it natural, personal, physical, political, or financial. The piece was included in a curated section of the fair called PINTA EMERGE in which Jose Roca, adjunct curator of Latin American art at Tate London and Artistic Director of Bogotá art space FLORA ars+natura (Bogota/London), included 8 emerging artists’ projects within the theme of “Modern Ruin.” Roca said, “ruins used to be a remote past and were evoked with nostalgia. But nowadays ancient ruins coexist with those of Modernity.” PINTA EMERGE, including Mancera’s piece, was intended to reflect on the spoils of our most recent past.
For the posters in The New York Times with black backgrounds, the artist drew tiny individual black lines in successive rows until the page was entirely filled and became a black ground, a technique Mancera has used in other projects, which gives a lively, hand-made feel to imagery and at the same time references a machine-printed origin. The meticulously hand-drawn technique he uses throughout all of his works give them a very personal and deliberate quality.
His drawings are primarily done on paper in ink or pencil, sometimes including watercolor. They are emotional works and explore the sadness of everyday life. It has been said that his drawings have a child-like or youthful quality. Many of them confront fears about love, trust and loneliness and often, in his imagery of humans connecting with domestic pets (as in I’ll Always Remember but now I Forget) or of animal-like creatures set in human scenarios (as in I’m Afraid), they convey the experience of feeling like the "other" in a given situation or the world. Some evoke the weariness that can be found in today’s connected and traveling culture, where the entire world is at our fingertips and the dismay that such infinite geographic possibility can create. Paquita la del Barrio said in an essay about his work that, in his drawings, “sadness, smallness, frustration and hatred are always active and in many, it is he who is shown as perpetrator or directly responsible for representing those situations.” In an interview with Volketa, a blogzine run by graffiti artist Saga Uno in Bogotá, Saga Uno said that Mancera’s drawings recalled moments of pain or loneliness and heartbreak, but he acknowledged that even with these recurring themes - misfortune, agony, love, heartbreak, death - the result is not necessarily negative, but more prominently human.
Mancera is a brilliant illustrator but also conceptually many of his works have played with the idea of replication or transcription, “listing” or categorizing, as well as projects which pair together acts with drawings and photographs or hand-drawn postcards that were mailed between two destinations. Mancera speaks in a simple language, a very human language that we can all understand. However you might also say that it is a language, medium and geographic output center that the international art market, to their own detriment, has been somewhat slow to embrace. In a 2012 article for W magazine, Eric Banks discussed how Colombia’s legacy in narco-trafficking and guerilla warfare have been turned around and that international curators, such as Klaus Biesenbach of MoMA PS1, contemporary art curator Jens Hoffman, and prominent art critic, curator and historian, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, have engaged with the country for the past decade. Hoffman says, “It’s such a strong, young scene, with such a particular language. And it’s as if it suddenly came into being. There are a lot of continuities with an earlier generation that wasn’t very well known outside of the country—interests in form, in social issues—but it’s very subtle, which is fascinating.” Despite the growing interest in the market, it still must be difficult for individual artists to determine if and how they want to seek an international audience.
Even navigating the world of local collectors in the region must have been challenging for artists. As Banks assessed the burgeoning art market in Bogotá, he quoted Carlos Hurtado, 31, the director of Galería Nueveochenta (coincidentally, the gallery who represents Mancera), who said that before the city’s turnaround, “collecting was a social problem.” Banks surmised that many “viewed the business of art, in particular, as either a front for money laundering or an excuse to churn out Botero-style knock-offs.” Despite that mired history, it is no doubt that the art scene in Bogotá is active and getting attention.
One wonders how Kevin Simón Mancera might feel about his country’s progression in today’s globalized art world. Many of his works reflect such a personal journey and statement it is hard to imagine unflinching support of an extremely globalized art market (the kind that has created an increasing number of biennials as tourist attractions), though the desire as an artist to share your work broadly must be somewhat inherent to artistic practice. Mancera manages to create work of a highly personal nature, with a deliberate and meticulous hand while also acknowledging and confronting universal constructs he finds problematic and to which we can all relate.
As in The New York Times from the Pinta Art Fair, Mancera presented a critical view of the news before in his 2009 piece Al Mal Tiempo, Mala Cara(perhaps a play on the phrase “al mal tiempo, buena cara" or “when everything goes wrong, keep smiling.”). In this piece, he reproduced the entire May 1st (Labor Day) issue of El Tiempo (the official journal of Colombia) but preserved only the bad news, omitting positive news and advertising. While the blank areas are noticeable, they are few, seemingly a statement on our obsession with negative sensationalization in media. The detailed reproduction took him four months to make and an edition of 3,000 prints were shown at ARTBO 2009, Bogotá’s annual international art fair, as part of a newsstand installation. Editions were sold for 3500 pesos, approximately two dollars. As Santiago Ramos Bravo described in the introduction to a short interview with Mancera, the illustrated newspaper required significant effort and detail, though it was a reproduction of an issue from Labor Day, a day upon which nobody actually works. Bravo found this to be ironic and “a critical discourse on the Colombian reality, on the value of work, as well as the value of art.”
Similarly in its conceptual exploration of negative language, in 2008 Mancera created a piece called Lista Negra (or Blacklist), in which a selection of words with any negative connotation found in the dictionary were hand-drawn. He described it as "a long list of pessimism and offense, treated with a long and patient drawing." The piece shows his continued interest in an exploration or quantification or historical record of negative language. Mancera said, “language and the objects it inhabits are an attractive source of inspiration to my work. Books, magazines, conversations, chat tools, emails, mail, the internet, dictionaries or...newspapers. By exploring these elementary mediums I can methodically collect and show themes and I can do it in a way that is meticulous and manual.”
His “listing” of negative concepts also appeared in an earlier work titled Cien Cosas Que Odio or 100 Things I Hate of 2007. It is a humorous, but very personal “list” of drawings of things that Kevin hates, including ice in his Coke, “committed or cause” artists (such as Bono of the band U2), Op Art and tight shorts. Mancera has discussed his drawings as a “classifier to organize the world that surrounds me.”
In a more conceptual piece involving the act of traveling, drawings and photographs, titled La Felicidad or Happiness of 2012, Kevin made a pilgrimage to territories literally named “Happiness” in seven different countries in Latin America. He traveled to these places with only a few notebooks and a camera, filled the notebooks with drawings and snapped a photograph nearest to the point of the exact coordinates of the location deemed “Happiness.” In this piece, Mancera seems to be on a quest to again explore language, or what it might mean to name a place with an emotional term describing a feeling. Is this location emblematic of happiness? As a traveler to or inhabitant of this location, will you become happy? Will this happiness remain with you when you leave?
This series may also have been exploring the mythology of traveling, present in the pilgrimages people have made to iconic destinations for centuries. However the purpose of these types of journeys seem to have developed a new role in contemporary society. With smartphones and the ability not only to pinpoint your exact location with GPS at any time, but also to capture and share images of yourself in any location instantaneously, a new experience is developing. When the viewer sees images of travelers in iconic destinations, such as the Eiffel Tower, Machu Picchu etc. they feel as though they know these places themselves. Gabriel Jejia Abad says that we assume we know these places we see in the photos, even if we have never been, and we take for granted that the traveler is happy in these places. I don’t believe Mancera subscribes to that sort of happiness. His images of locations named “Happiness” are of desolate places. Abad says that “happiness, as Kevin Mancera shows us, is not even in the places that hold the name.” She goes further to project that, “maybe happiness resides in being able to escape, to disappear and create from disappearance, new architectures from those places.” I am not convinced Mancera would have expressed this as a result of the piece. I don’t think he wanted us to realize that happiness is to be found in the journey. I simply think he wanted us to recognize the inherent illusion in the name. Mancera said, “If I engage in a critical outlook by choosing to highlight negative content I am making a comment about reality and our falsely optimistic society.”
Mancera created two series of works which explored the unfortunate end to a celebrated highpoint for various famous individuals in Todo Tiene Su Final (Everything Has its End) from 2011 or portraits of individuals who did not reach their potential due to a specific moment of failure in Sobre el Fracaso (On Failure) of 2010. In one of these works, the bicycle rider Roger Riverie, a three time world champion, is depicted after a fatal crash in the Tour de France in 1960. He was then confined to a wheelchair. On a lighter note, Mancera rendered a scene in which Nicole Ritchie kisses Paris Hilton on the cheek. This is based on a real image which was captured after the well publicized fight between the two which ended their reality show and seemingly their friendship.
Mancera is not interested in playing along with the falsehoods created by the power structures and social constructs of today’s society. His recurring subversion of our use of language or our perceptions about happiness, fame and the media may have roots in his early development as an artist. As an art student in 2005, Mancera was part of a group of students and professors who founded an art space in Bogotá called El Bodegón which “fostered an ethos of experimentation, risk, and spontaneity” that stood in contrast to the city’s institutionally recognized practices which were deemed self-serving. The organization is said to have had an antagonistic relationship to the city’s art infrastructure and “sought to to create a map of artists’ real practices: the kind of things done for one’s own enjoyment rather than a commitment to a certain social status or the maintenance and furthering of professional aspirations.” The organization was short-lived (it lasted only four years) due to lack of funding and organizational disagreements, however is now recognized as having paved the way for a continuation of new artist-run initiatives developing in the city.
Mancera has continued practicing in this do-it-yourself manner throughout his career. In December of 2010, he and his wife, Andrea Triana launched Jardín Publications, an independent publishing organization focusing on and producing editorial products, publications and fanzines for young Colombian artists in Bogotá.
Kevin also runs Radio Volcán Mudo (Silent Volcano Radio), a weekly radio program, featuring expertly crafted playlists based on various themes (my personal favorites including playlists themed around cats, rhythmic beats or death) which are released online and paired with a drawing.
Though their materials and aesthetic are quite different, I cannot help but draw comparisons ideologically and in subject matter between Kevin Simón Mancera and fellow Colombian painter, sculptor, critic, curator and art historian of a previous generation, Beatriz González. Gonzalez addressed the dissemination of newspaper and documentary images in her work and she created “representations of representations” in her paintings on pieces of everyday furniture, thereby subverting the function of her medium as Mancera often subverts our use of language. Gonzalez and Mancera both rework ideas of loss in a playful manner, one fraught with elegantly dark humor (as Bravo described Mancera’s personality).
Despite the long list of negative emotions we have identified in Mancera’s content, it is not to say that optimism cannot be found in connecting with his work. He is our anti-hero. Mancera has said that ideally “his drawing is a language that generates a proximity relationship between the persons who see it because there are no tricks or artifices.” He also believes “that portraying pessimism leaves two options to the spectators: they identify with this reality or feel fortunate for not sharing other people’s misfortunes.”[3] I personally prefer the former, human connection through the acknowledgement of our shared, but imperfect reality.
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