Artists: Leonel Luna
Leonel Luna is passionate about history and its representation. As a
trained painter, he has chosen to question the fundamental limitations
inherent to the depiction of reality through the appropriation and
reworking of iconic paintings. But his works are made with means which
are not commonly associated with the genre of painting: photography and
digital media.
Furthermore, Luna's amazing quotations of historical works are
carefully elaborated through theatrical staging: in his constructed
images, the sitters are replaced by photographs of the artist himself
in multiple guises. His palette is as virtual as the resulting image:
using montage and critical collages of contemporary events he
reconstructs the fictions of the past, in order to uncover the illusion
behind all representation and tell us more about the cyclic nature of
history.
The source of the work in this exhibition is an epic painting by
Uruguayan painter Juan Manuel Blanes, originally titled Ocupación
militar de Rio Negro 1879,better known asLa conquista del desierto. It
was painted in 1898, during the electoral campaign that resulted in
General Justo Argentino Roca second mandate. The general, presented in
the original work as one of the horsemen at the centre of the image, is
surrounded by his officials, engineers and specialists who accompanied
him in his campaign. The aim of the campaign was to occupy indigenous
territories by the extermination of the aboriginal inhabitants. General
Roca wasan army general who served as President of Argentina twice:
from 1880 to 1886 and again from 1898 to 1904.He occupies an iconic
place in Argentina's history as the mastermind of the largest massacre
of Patagonia's native population.
In his own Conquista del desierto, Luna depicts a contemporary struggle
by photographing himself as different horsemen representing the many
protagonists of Argentina's XXI century crisis: homeless, demonstrators
and piqueteros: the victims of the most recent economic collapse. In
addition, he includes real images which he shot during public
demonstrations - such as the rows of police officers and the walking
protesters holding placards seen on the left hand side of the painting.
The result is a precise, formal recreation of Blanes' painting, where
the supposedly epic conquest is substituted by current conquests and
defeats.
But the viewer's disbelief is enhanced by another revelation: Blanes'
painting is also a construction: the composition was never staged, but
arranged employing an array of photographic portraits of the sitters to
create a final tableau of epic dimensions.
By mimicking make-believe Luna not only manipulates the mechanisms of
art: he also unveils the heroic contained in the marginal side of our
reality.
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La conquista del desierto / The Conquest of the Desert
2002
Digital print on vinyl
260 x 150 cm
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