Christian Camacho, The Dream’s Prototype, 2019

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Apropiándose de imágenes del manga cyberpunk japonés “Akira”, Christian Camacho le ofrece a el o la residente de esta habitación una pepita de oro del más antiguo y no menos complejo (Borges dixit) de los géneros literarios: los sueños. El prototipo del sueño es un montaje en video en el que se muestran escenas inconexas de persecuciones y acciones improbables a través de ciudades como laberintos, visiones de colores brillantes, proezas de velocidad, al final la lejana destrucción de todo lo que se conoce, el horror que provoca saber que nuestro verdadero poder individual se reduce a salvar de la hecatombe un solo rayo de luz que se disolverá de todos modos entre nuestras manos. El delirio onírico se distorsiona aun más cuando el lienzo de proyección de esta visión es una roca dentro de una jarra de agua. El agua como filtro entre el sueño y su proyección introduce una dimensión material a la obra que nos recuerda ficciones sobre mundos submarinos, pero también el regreso al vientre materno, nuestra única posibilidad de vivir bajo el agua. No será la última vez en la exposición que veremos referencias identificables a productos culturales japoneses, impresos en el repertorio estético de artistas jóvenes que crecieron leyendo cómics y mangas, viendo animaciones y caricaturas que permean sus obras de un modo más claro que cualquier referencia a una genealogía artística explícitamente mexicana.

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By appropriating images from the Japanese cyberpunk manga “Akira”, Christian Camacho offers the resident of this room a gold nugget from the oldest and no less complex (Borges dixit) of the literary genres: dreams. “The Dream’s Prototype” is a video montage in which disconnected scenes of chases are shown through labyrinthine cities in visions of bright colors and feats of speed, arriving to the horror of its total destruction and the realization that ones own futility to help: a single ray of light saved from the catastrophe disolved in the characters’ hands. The dreamlike delirium is further distorted when the projection canvas of this vision is a rock inside a jug of water. Water as a filter between the dream and its projection introduces a material dimension to the work that reminds us of fictions about underwater worlds, but also the return to the mother's womb, our only possibility of living freely underwater. It will not be the last time in the exhibition that we will see identifiable references to Japanese cultural products, printed in the aesthetic repertoire of young artists who grew up reading comics and manga, watching animations and cartoons that permeate their works more clearly than any reference to a explicitly Mexican artistic genealogy.

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The Dream’s Prototype is part of The Dream And The Underworld series, a body of work prepared as a result of information extracted from my own dreams in past years. This information, as I call it, has been reconfigured through my ideas within sculpture and painting for its transportation to the waking realm.

The re-assemblage of dream-narratives implies an interest in the amplification of thought accompanying the distinct aspects of imagination in its course towards the shadow. Emphasizing the scrutiny of this imagination of the underworld reveals that its parts are bound without ascertaining the precise character of this bond, thus making possible to see the different faces of this material –as psychoanalyst James Hillman has called it– in all its fluid familiarity: the transformation of the natural world, the anomalies of the built environment, the behaviour of those around us and the presence of fear.

To extract this shadow, this nocturnal mass, is also a form of sympathy for a specific kind of gaze in which continuity between the forms of the unexpected, the inevitable and the lived, is desired: this is the sign of the labour carried by the brood of Night.

Simultaneously an epilogue and an introduction, I include the following fragment by John Berger about the implications of noticing this sort of events, thanking my good friend and artist Sachin Kaeley for leading me to it:

I had a dream in which I was a strange dealer: a dealer in looks or appearances. I collected and distributed them. In the dream I had just discovered a secret! I discovered it on my own, without help or advice. The secret was to get inside whatever I was looking at – a bucket of water, a cow, a city (like Toledo) seen from above, an oak tree, and, once inside, to arrange its appearances for the better. Better did not mean making the thing seem more beautiful or more harmonious; nor did it mean making it more typical, so that the oak tree might represent all oak trees; it simply meant making it more itself so that the cow or the city or the bucket of water became more evidently unique! The doing of this gave me pleasure and I had the impression that the small changes I made from the inside gave pleasure to others. The secret of how to get inside the object so as to rearrange how it looked was as simple as opening the door of a wardrobe. Perhaps it was merely a question of being there when the door swung open on its own. Yet when I woke up, I couldn’t remember how it was done and I no longer knew how to get inside things.

Christian Camacho