The News is Not Yesterday´s

Reading times 3.30 minutes

The News is Not Yesterday´s is a contemporary exibition by Javier Dragustinovis. From May 27 to July  27 on Titan Studio, 203 N. Commerce, Harlingen, Texas.

The News is Not Yesterday's

In a time where an original is multiplication and quote, and where (non)voluntary reappropriation defines our relationship with the image, the copy is where the contour to which reality appeals.

This landscape is where the drawings of "The News is Not Yesterday´s" roam; in two visible elements (positive and negative) and an absence (the original).

One of the questions lingering between the lines in this proposal is whether yesterday’s news are still today’s and if they’ll still be tomorrow’s. Likewise, the show also questions the meaning of drawing and representation.

Carbon paper was always considered as just the dwelling of that which is unskilled, everything that is a copy; not the democratization of drawing and the way towards reappropriation as well as the possibility to reach and attain the line which defines and names.

In "The News is Not Yesterday´s", reality is reappropriated, recognized through image. Upon breaking up what is real, its complexity is revealed. Image is one of those spaces where the objective and the subjective achieve a dialogue.

Is what we see that which is?
Is what we see that which was?
Transferred image is proof and rebuttal.

Within the show, in drawings on the wall or on paper, image as imprint and carbon paper as intermediary enunciate a statement and a question to the observer and complete the statement: Is what I see truth?

In a conversation with mural painting, images generate a disjointed tale, hazardous but at the same time revealing a gravity center: shape.

Likewise, we do know that a piece is missing from this puzzle. We can’t find the "original", but we know it exists, it is in this gap that the artwork is generated.

The "News is Not Yesterday´s" makes an appeal to the footprint, not the original; the reading and its possibilities, the void between images themselves, their relation to one another, the trace, the absence… It’s the reference that resists significance; an image revealing and at the same time diluting and becomes evanescent as smoke, as dust, as light.

To go through these drawings diluting in their permanent reworking may remind us of Zygmunt Bauman, or make us recall Marc Augé’s non-place when they may seem to move between spaces without ever finding a definite one.

Titan Studio, managed and run by Aleida y Brian Wedgworth, is the space where you may appreciate this exhibition, located in a former warehouse in the old downtown of Harlingen, Texas.

This exhibit space, which is also Aleida & Brian’s art studio, is a peculiar place that still keeps its past as an industrial and storage building very much alive. The brick walls contrast with the industrial bulkheads, all of which allow the drawings to obtain new associations and lectures relating to the surroundings.

Photographs by Nicola Giuliato
Artist contacts:
www.javierdragustinovis.com
javierdragustinovis.tumblr.com