Danzad, danzad, malditos: Carlos Aires

Although the work of Carlos Aires talks about an uncomfortable reality, this is only its background. Sometimes the image hides its acidity by mimicking itself with pop colors; sometimes the image adopts the shape of its own content. At any case, the result is always a beautiful image, easy to see, or at least of a concealed sweetness. But the image offers to the spectator the factor of surprise, the possibility of discovering most of times under its appearance an acid, perturbing and politically incorrect lecture. This concealing is evidenced by the title of the exhibition.

“Danzad, danzad, malditos” is the Spanish translation of the film by Sydney Pollack “They shoot horses, don’t they?”. Produced in 1969, is the story of a dance marathon, that were common during the Great Depression of the USA. These contests, fed by the strong economical and social crisis, offered the poorest ones the opportunity of seeing the American Dream becoming true. The fact is that this kind of spectacle was possible not only because of the economical situation, but also because of the growing power of the new media, Hollywood industry especially. Young desperate people used to go there and dance, following the illusion of showing themselves in public for the chance to succeed as cinema stars, and of course, with nothing to lose. This was definitely its nicest face, the possibility of an opportunity.

But if the American Dream is defined by the opening of possibility, its attractive appearance is also hiding hard effort, suffering and pain, which are constantly increasing by the related growing of ambition, and this is on what the film insists.

This double appearance of reality is characteristic of Carlos Aires’ work, being basically, the leitmotiv in his artistic career. So, starting from the postulate that reality is always showed as manipulated, pre-generated to us, through different filters as mass media, he seems to have decided to distort it.

In “Danzad, danzad, malditos” Carlos Aires not only shows himself to be quite able to transit between narrations, contents and containers, but also express himself comfortably through the most different media. He is presenting, apart of the mentioned series, “Mister Hyde”, a video where an infrared camera recorded images from two different situations. The first one is a terror castle in a funfair, the other one is a dark room of a gay discotheque in Antwerpen, the Belgian city where the artists lives. The images, after an edition process, are almost undistinguishable.

The work of Carlos Aires confronts us to a world where opposites coincide. Reality and fiction, true and false, natural and artificial, tradition and contemporariness, are dichotomies that here are confused. The unity of his work is defined in the right moment where these dichotomies are conciliated.