Suite Duchamp

The impact and importance of Marcel Duchamp’s achievements as well as the enduring influence of his plural legacy make him one of the towering figures of twentieth-century Western art. Many artists have produced art inspired by the enigmatic master’s output but —to my knowledge— no one  has ever attempted what I have accomplished: to dedicate a whole body of work to a one-of-a-kind conceptual and pictorial dialogue with his artistic persona and creations.

The Suite Duchamp displays an unabashed appropriation of images concerning many of the artist’s most emblematic works as well as his own person. In a metaphorical sense, they are the “ready-mades” which I —also in a highly Duchampian fashion— select, recontextualize, “assist” and endow with new meanings. Thus, Duchamp himself and his artistic output are subjected to their own subversive power. The consequences are conspicuously ironical. But a sharper and more profound irony stems from the fact that the Suite Duchamp is a group of paintings executed exclusively with the “retinal” means that he so adamantly rejected. Furthermore, the accurate depictions, the choices of size, position, proportion and composition, the interplays of textures, the economy and austerity of color —poignantly slanted towards the symbolic— converge in images whose neatness, elegance, and disconcerting beauty can be construed as the ultimate irony. And, paradoxically, also as a celebration. Therefore, the Suite Duchamp vibrates in the elusive and mutating zone between the ludic and the serious, negation and confirmation, dissent and assimilation —the very minimal territory that he defined as infra-thin.

To a viewer versed on Duchamp the Suite is from beginning to end a rewarding experience. The same could be said —but for other reasons— of those less informed about his accomplishments. Because the images are arresting, provocative, suggestive and laden with cultural capital, they lure the viewer to inquire and to produce his or her own interpretations. With freedom of the eye, freedom of the hand, and freedom of the mind, the master is summoned from history by a painter several generations apart to break once more “the glacial regard of the public.” A “delay” indeed.

Alberto Jorge Carol

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