Jon Gorospe

Jon Gorospe - Blue/Red Leds/Gestures

Artist Biography: Jon Gorospe (b.1986 Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain). Lives and works in Oslo, Norway. Holds a B.A. degree from the SCHOOL OF ARTS ID·Arte, Basque Country (Spain) and the VILNIUS FACULTY OF ARTS (Lithuania). As one of the authors of the new photography wave, Gorospe has been recognized by several public and private institutions, such as the Guggenheim Museum/Basque Artist Programme (Spain-USA), Sasakawa Foundation (Japan-Scandinavia), Futures Photography (Europe Creative Programme), Ankaria Foundation (Spain) and VEGAP (Spain). His work focuses on new approaches to the idea of the anthropized landscape, he combines his work as a creator with the study and understanding of the image from a theoretical point of view. Collaborating in different projects as a curator and photo-editor, directing photography festivals and participating in panel debates and publications.

 

Looking up to the sky, Frost contemplates the firmament, and holds before the graceful dance of endless drops that flutter, and draw with light over the dark background of the night. The poet raises the trembling flame of the minuscule firefly to the ardent light of the monumental stars, delighted with the shimmering splendour. This is a privileged gaze, one that allies the human, the natural and the celestial. Menacing, the human-being, and his technologies of light, affronts the pulsating glare of the firefly. In Survivance des lucioles, Didi-Huberman notes, with melancholy, the annihilation of the fireflies under the blinding light of the "ferocious projectors" that disseminate tyrannical propaganda. However, as he then realises, these other fireflies, human creatures of the survival of thinking, do not disappear. They merely fly to another place, where seeing is not blinded. The exhibition "The Spot", by Jon Gorospe, appears as one of these places. The artist's thoughts are triggered by the post-photographic theories concerning the excess of images created and circulating, which shifts the imperative of the documentary activity to election and validation. Particularly, the artist focuses on the oppressive invasion of the public space by screens and advertising propaganda. Excavating a moat between reality and fiction, engendering dangerous emotions, the effect of the advertising image upon the most trivial spheres of human life arouses thoughts concerning the capture of free-will, the illusion of the unfulfilled fantasy, identity according to consumption, the downfall of the satisfied pleasure, or the strike on self-esteem. It is about the alienation and drainage of the human spirit at the hands of the diabolical machine of Guy Débord's La societé du spectacle. Such gaze of the human being, enchanted yet numb, succumbing to the technological misadventure, is that of Narcisus, as the artist notices, inasmuch as that which follows the course of Icarus. Beyond a place for survival, "The Spot" is configured as a gesture of resistance and hope. The exhibition stems from Jon Gorospe's stealth penetration in the gloomy maze of the "ferocious projectors", collecting advertising images in LED screens. Appropriating their elemental component, as if their luminescent substance, the artist sabotages the existing images by resorting to the same seduction expedients of publicity. In drops and strokes of light, in nuances of rhythms and colors, over a nocturnal sky, Jon Gorospe creates original images in photography and video, inducing a contemplative and meditative mood. It is smuggling - even guerrilla -, following Irit Roggoff's metaphor, in the form of an embodied artistic practice, inhabiting and operating the very object that it problematizes, and experiments in its interior, creating something new, something that emerges outwards from within and that reveals itself in the course of the process. Under the systematic organization of the LED, hints of fleeting fireflies still remain, in their potential, in this clandestine underground where Jon Gorospe finds them, yet ready to escape, and to fly. Ricardo Escarduça Curator