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  Art Notes
I Am Not Here, But I Am
Angel Poyón
06/23/2010


Luis Camnitzer


In November, 2009, I was in Guatemala for sessions of critical dialog with Central American artists. One of these artists was Ángel Poyón, who provided me with a new experience. Poyón is a Native American artist, deeply connected to his community in the Guatemalan town of San Juan Comalapa. In turn, Comalapa is notorious for having developed a pseudo-autochthonous style of art, in the way of Haiti¿s tourism-oriented painting; this is to say, a kind of art that responds to the image of the autochthonous that tourists already bring with them. Such a commercial veneer generates employment for local artists but contributes nothing to the communitarian culture they belong to. I was particularly interested in Poyón because he is one of the few artists bold enough to attempt to break away from this scheme. Fully aware of the problem, he attempts to update his people¿s artistic language in order to better represent it. He opens himself up to the hegemonic repertoire, but puts them to the service of solving the problems confronted by his people in a process of dilution of identity as they struggle to assimilate. All across the continent, under the Nineteenth-Century notion of ¿national integration¿ and the drive to expand and unify the market, local identities are constantly eroded. In particular with his ¿tombstones,¿ Poyón is able to address two publics that are normally in conflict, and to contribute to their greater awareness. This is a task that not many artists assume, and in my conversations with him his position was very clear and forthcoming in that regard. It seemed to me an important position and an undertaking that needed to be shared, and that is what made me ask Poyón to write the text that follows, exclusively for ArtNexus.

Luis Camnitzer

I Am Not Here, But I Am
Ángel Poyón

I started to paint alongside my brother. In 1992, at a festival in my town, on the day of San Juan Bautista in honor of the Patron Saint of Comalapa ¿ that is why my town is called San Juan Comalapa¿ the neighbor who painted didn¿t have the time and we painted for half a day, my brother and I. He made a painting of a procession and I painted the Comalapa town fair.

The town is 82 kilometers from Guatemala City and is a town with many painters, followers of Andrés Curruchich¿s popular painting. He was the first to paint scenes of Comalapa, and it made Comalapa to be named the Florence of America by the Italian doctors who came to offer humanitarian help after the 1976 earthquake. There was such a boom that later, as part of the Arte Paiz biennial, a special category was created for indigenous artists to participate from communities across Guatemala. We began painting in our free time, still in high school. In 1994 we were part of the Quetzal group, a group of painters formed to promote the work of its members and of other Comalapa painters, who at that time shared experiences with artists from Norway, and we had graphic arts workshops. In 1997 we exhibited at the Alliance Française in Guatemala City, and I found out that three of my colleagues had painted the same street scenes in Antigua, Guatemala, and it made me wonder whether the four painters thought and saw the world in the same way. After rethinking what it is that we are really trying to say in art, with Hugo Pichiyá we decided to change the topics of our work. Hugo paints in one way and I paint in another way, and we questioned each other constantly. At that time I began reflecting about the consequences of the armed conflict in my community. I remember that several older painters told me that the subject was too delicate and that I should be careful with it, even now. I made several canvases showing what I felt and what I saw happening in those years; these were figurative paintings with solitary characters and emptiness in the canvas. In 2002 we were approached by the Fundación Colloquia para el Arte Contemporáneo, headed by Luis González Palma, and I remember that by that time I was working on the series of tombstones and my brother on a topspin. Darío Escobar and Javier Payeras visited Comalapa, we showed them these works and they thought they were interesting. They invited us to present them at the foundation in the show Play, Las cosas no son lo que aparentan. On the day of the show, some people were asking to see the paintings of the Comalapa artists. They wanted to see paintings and we had worked in different media. In parallel to this, we also met the Comunicarte group led by Roberto Cabrera, who helped to bring a series of dialogs about art to Comalapa. This is to tell you a little bit about our beginning in art. In terms of from where do my interests come as I work on my art, I will tell you now, in those years I realize that children were not being told the stories, tales, and myths from the mouths of their grandparents¿ I thought about that and dealt with it in my work. I remembered when my grandparents told me stories of ghosts by the fire; it was fantastic to listen to them and some of us always asked them to repeat the stories because each time they had a different flavor, and we imagined them in different ways. We almost never interrupted, only when the town crier came and we went out to hear the news and then we ran from corner to corner and came back home with the notes left by those characters. We always sat down again to continue listening to grandpa or grandma; we traveled through the land, through the air, through fire, through water in their words. We became birds, jaguars, snakes, or any other animal, and were gripped by suspense as we only had the light of the fire that warmed our faces and the rest of the kitchen was dark. Now we ran away with our food, each one in his or her own room to watch TV or listen to music coming from outside. All those ghosts that lived in the town¿s dark alleys and in our ravines have disappeared, and new ones appeared, the lampposts in the corners that frightened away our old ghosts with their cables that cover the sky; now they are the ones who frighten us because when we fly kites, they capture them, and at night we are scared to see them move like the spirits that used to walk the streets. Now you hear nothing about those apparitions that used to come to our streets. It must be because now we have television, radio, other machines, which are even replacing our religious images. Everybody is placing them in important places in their homes, taking care of them, cleaning them, and when they see them die they run to find a technician to fix them and put them again in their altar. We dress now like the people we see on TV; this is why we made an allusion to Narcissus in an installation with mirrors and TV sets that advertised a contest with prizes that come on soda tops, and it seemed we were going towards the sources of desire, obsessed with finding those prizes, our heads were filled with them and they became part of our way of life, an entire way of life, a greed for things that have changed and impacted our environment and our collective memory¿ Nowadays with great nostalgia in the mouths of our grandparents: Ah, they sigh¿ *xaxe jaltaj b¿iq¿a Ruwech ri q¿a K¿aslem re, re¿ (¿only and precisely it was the face of life that changed¿) they said, I know, and if I were asked I wouldn¿t know how to explain at what point everything changed, it all came from outside¿like those modern drawings that I never understood, and they surprise me and attract me to look at them carefully, with my mouth open, while life continued to pass by and the face of my community changed, with those houses that grew out of proportion with the money sent back by those who emigrated to the north and who in a way are lost in time and I with them in my own community.

Ángel Poyón

 


 

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