2017

Game of 54 cards

Jorge Molder

Self-portraitPerformanceExperimental PhotographyStaging

Since the end of the seventies, Jorge Molder has been exploring the possible variations and intersections between the self-portrait and the self-representation, as a peculiar and fruitful domain in the investigation of the multiple and unpredictable connections between the perceptibility of appearances and the intricacies of the experience of the imagination. In many of the series he has produced in the meantime, we are continually confronted with the presence of the artist, who reveals his face and expressions, gestures and body movements. Nevertheless, what we see is the exemplary presence of an indistinct and generic figure, with a minimal set of characteristics, a figure that mediates various figures, roles, semblances and substitutes, the protagonist of a game destined to reconfigure our understanding of the differences and overlaps between the ideas of authenticity and dissimulation, reality and fiction, physical body and body-image. This exhibition presents the most recent series by Jorge Molder, Jeu de 54 cartes, produced throughout the current year. Based on the typical structure of the popular French deck of cards, consisting of four suits of thirteen cards each, the artist created a series of photographs with six parts: fifty-two images divided into four suits (Faces, Hands, Bits, Specters) , two more Jokers and a picture of a Template. The notion of play is an essential element in Jorge Molder's creative process. The game emerges as an activity that incites us to a heuristic experience of things, which configures the possibility of being open to everything that deviates from pre-established conventions, categories and structures of understanding. Applied to the field of art, it is a notion that certifies art as a practice that formulates its own “rules”, the possibility of neglecting deliberate intention, systematization, prior discourse, in favor of the experience of the possible, spontaneity and interpretive availability. The game and, correlatively, chance and intuition, point to decisive questions in this research in which Jorge Molder correlates the work of demultiplication of (his) figures with the essential dilemmas of our relationship with images.