The three photographic essays: Beirut Walls (2002-2004), Buenos Aires Walls (2007-2009) and “Monumentos a la Deriva” (2013-2014), are for me three complementary sides of the diverse societal mix, Lebanon and Argentina, in which I live.
In “Buenos Aires Walls”, as I joined my Argentine wife in Buenos Aires, I could not help but notice the political propaganda painted on all the walls of the city bordering high speed motorways; this juxtaposition of early twentieth painting techniques with twenty-first century motorway speed appeared to me as a total “telescopage” of means, place, technique and purpose of the kind described by my Architecture and Urbanism teacher Paul Virilio.
As I decided to photograph these in color slides for personal reference, I got everyday more interested in the details of the paintings; after having shot all the large letters and punctuation in their own right, after all, at 2m of height, their presence is a striking one, I got closer and closer.
What stroke me then is the constant palimpsest that occurs; each political era, with money and influence defining who is able to contract the profesional letter painters, defines what is written on the Wall; what was written previously is not erased but written over, after years and years, many messages appear one on top of the other, a palimpsest of another sort.
From close and with these superpositions of text, the message and its purpose receides and appears the details of the writing technique and painting movements that no one sees otherwise;
The details of the letters take a life of their own; no more part of a typical western calligraphy of the 1930’s, they seem to be extracts of an asian minimalist calligraphy; immediately remind me of my mother’s training in such techniques in the 1970’s.
Getting even closer, lettering and lines would at their turn fade in the background, and it would be colors and textures that would take preeminence: even though overexposed and “passe” to the eyes of the early twenty-first century, these walls would exhude the orangish red of the 1950’s as well as its contemporay blues and in betweens. Getting even closer, gestures and drippings reminiscent of the 1940’s painting movement started by Pollock jumps up.
It is because of the difficulty (some gallerists even thought I was trying to promote the paintings!) to accept this telescopage of 20th century history that this series has proven very interesting and inspiring to some Argentine painters, friends of my wife.
Christian Catafago
