Aiden as a Wolf Art Aiden as a Wolf Art Animal
Wolf – José María Yagüe Manzanares
★★★★
The piece of work at the heart of Spanish artist José María Yagüe Manzanares'due south exhibition Wolf has its beginnings back in 2008. That year, a friend of the artist gave him some photographs of the crumpled trunk of a wolf lying by a roadside. It had been hit by passing state highway traffic in Cuéllar, Segovia. Police force officers called to the scene buried the dead wolf. Manzanares'south friend knew exactly where it was cached and, some months later, they exhumed the body to recover the beast's skull. Move on a few years and Manzanares was in Republic of ireland, exploring the Westward coast, making paintings as he travelled.
The paintings were a kind of record of his travels, a visual diary. He depicted familiar and less familiar subjects, in a mode of neutral, deadpan realism and with great technical fluency. Information technology was integral to his projection that he carried his work with him every bit he moved effectually and display information technology in accessible locations wherever he could. Somehow it caught the eye of Aoibheann McNamara of Ard Bía in Galway (who, apart from her other interests, is a person of exceptional curatorial flair and feel) and she staged an exhibition of the paintings.
Interred
It may have been during this trip that Manzanares climbed Carrauntoohil and interred the wolf skull close to the elevation. It'south hard to pin downward an accurate chronology, because several different accounts generate some ambivalence, merely he has written that he brought the wolf skull to Ireland at this time. He heard stories of how, in the 18th century, the final of Republic of ireland'southward wolves was hunted downwardly shut to the mountain's height, and he conceived an intervention artwork composed of several strands. I important strand was to place his wolf skull on Carrauntoohil, as a memorial to Republic of ireland's lost wolves – and every bit a symbolic reintroduction of the wolf to Ireland.
Wolves exemplify homo ambivalence about the natural world. Stories of humans adopted and raised by wolves, as far dorsum as the Roman origin myth of Romulus and Remus and every bit recently equally yesterday, alternating with Little Reddish Riding Hood and werewolf-type tales, with the wolf as a signifier of pure savagery or, as in the film The Grey, for example, of anthropomorphic malevolence. But then, in that film, every bit in other fictional narratives, from the wolves' point of view humans – or in the case in point Liam Neeson – are the problem, not the heroes. Despite demonisation, wolves withal strike a sympathetic chord, as they do with the classical pianist Hélène Grimaud, to take another instance, who co-founded the Wolf Conservation Middle in New York State.
Evolved
Much of the material in Wolf (paintings, drawings, maps, collages, text, video and more) forms part of Manzanares's project, which evolved organically, developing and changing as it went forth, largely because that is the way he seems to work. He had long been interested in the human relationship between humans and animals in the world, especially wolves, and he grew attached to the mountainous southwest of Republic of ireland. He saw the Wolf projection as connecting 2 territories dearest to him, the Castilian plateau and the highlands of Kerry, with a symbolic presence he valued. At showtime, he aimed to consummate it in a more formal way, non just by secretly burying the skull, but likewise by creating a monument in the form of a black rock slab, sited in the Killarney National Park.
He shows several painted architectonic projections of what he had in mind and they are, in themselves, really impressive works. Other pieces offer variations on the thought of monuments, recalling the Wellington obelisk in the Phoenix Park – probably not by accident, as ane strand of the work involved visiting the wolf enclosure at Dublin Zoo, presented in the course of a theoretical proposal to gratis the wolves there dorsum into the wild.
Fourth dimension motorcar
On one of his visits to Republic of ireland Manzanares, like many others, was amazed to discover the Natural History Museum in Dublin. He saw information technology every bit a time machine transporting visitors to a 19th-century vision of the natural world, characterised past exploratory zeal, taxonomic ambition and boundless self-confidence, including a comfortable conviction of human superiority. The latter has been systematically undermined since, every bit humans, notwithstanding reluctantly, and in no small measure thanks to the efforts of those same 19th-century scientists, learn more almost their co-habitants of planet Earth. Manzanares made many paintings of individual "specimens" in the museum, several of which are on view here. Once more the works are cool and neutral, but they are as well, paradoxically, alive: beautiful portraits of private animals. These besides he exhibited equally a grouping at Fine art Bía, in part to raise funds for his ongoing Wolf projection.
While at that place is a retrospective cast to much of Manzanares's meticulously representational images, enhanced by such choices as his sepia-like use of greenish and brown inks, at that place is no nostalgia in his evocation of 19th-century naturalism. If he is reacting to the contemporary, information technology is in his quiet insistence on a tiresome, meditative engagement with the world we live in – that is, the undeniable otherness of the worlds of other species, of nature beyond the hall of mirrors generated past digital communications technologies. Wolf is a fascinating, provocative and enriching exhibition.
- Wolf is at the Oliver Sears Gallery, 29 Molesworth Street, Dublin, until June 22nd. oliversearsgallery.com
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Source: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art-and-design/visual-art/who-s-afraid-of-the-big-bad-deeply-symbolic-wolf-1.3522891
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