The Phillips Collection, which prides itself on being the first modern art center to open in the United States, has invited the algorithm artist Daniel Canogar (Madrid, 1964). On the wall that runs along the staircase the gallery, a four-story red brick house located in the embassy district of Washington, is projected the Amalgama Phillips: Images of the 550 works exhibited in the center appear incessantly and randomly, giving the sensation through movement that they melt and disappear to the bottom of the wall turned into liquid. A waterfall of colors and shapes evoked by Dalí. Canogar’s objective is for the public to reflect on “accelerated obsolescence” and the new digital reality where “everything passes and nothing remains”.
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The organizers of the Phillips centennial invited Canogar after seeing his work on the bicentennial of the Prado Museum in 2019: the Amalgam in the Prado, which also consists of the projection of images transformed by an algorithm that convert classical paintings into abstractions. The Office of Culture of the Embassy of Spain in Washington has inaugurated this exhibition on Wednesday, which arrives for the first time in the United States and will be open to the public until November 5.
Are the amalgams intended to be a critique of current times or to open a discussion? “I never see it as a criticism,” says Canogar in the cultural center of the Spanish embassy. “What I try with my work is to understand the new reality, its rhythm, its pulse, its tendencies. It’s like trying to understand it for myself, especially me, as a person confused and stunned by reality, by the sensory bombardment, by the excess of news … ”. The spectators, the artist points out, are the ones who must draw their conclusions about how the ephemeral is affecting our relationship with the material.
The work is projected in one of the main rooms of the former residence of the ambassador. However, the walls are bare and the blinds drawn. To appreciate the metamorphosis of the 900 works in El Prado, you have to look up to the oculus of the ballroom of the former residence of the embassy. There a circular video is projected in which works such as the girls and The Garden of Earthly Delights They rotate in a kind of whirlwind that ends up sucking up the paintings and dragging them into a black hole until they disappear.
Amalgams are not videos that have a beginning and an end. The same sequence is never repeated. An algorithm is in charge of giving the works a “life of their own”, something that has fascinated Canogar for years. “Generative art seems to me to be an incredible liberation. I’m already addicted, ”he says. “It’s like less ego. You leave something that is almost like a performance, a performance, it seems very poetic to me ”, he adds. The Madrilenian recognizes that it is a fundamental change, but that the paradox is that there is the idea that the human being has changed a lot in recent centuries, when in reality, Canogar points out, how different are the tools, the media, the technology , “But the existential dilemmas remain the same.”
