Gustavo Abascal

Cultural syndrome

05.29.2014 - 08.30.2014

CULTURAL SYNDROME

Where does evil come from? What is the possibility for posing this question, or is it really about a certain origin, a rupture of order? In present times, a notorious specialization reached by scientific vision prevails, even though we remain absorbed by certain sufferings that suggest alternatives, such as archaic pathways. These sufferings include mental distortions, moral or ethical disruptions; they reach our oneiric roots and the unconscious substrate in our society, furthermore it could mean a certain spiritual disorder. Is it the disequilibrium of the totality of reality? That explains consequently the persistence of shamans, witchcraft men, mediums or any other agent that has a gift for reestablishing equilibrium, their actions project and echo in the different layers of the individual and collective unconscious, mediated by experience and from the sufficient will to achieve efficiency.

Gustavo Abascal founds aesthetic material in the Mexican healing tradition, producing a reflective relation as he has been through ritual processes. This constitute, for the modern mentality a paradoxical resource that has been forgotten, to which, for sceptically driven minds, can only derive from “belief”, this is a symptom of a remnant primitivism. For the artist this is not a matter of a folklorist documentary but about confronting the roots of this cultural blindness, acknowledging in the other and honest expression of a boundary and impossibility. At the same time, in this dynamic of evil, limits trace the self and the other; in this threat of division a single gaze can unleash a transgression. There are gazes that alienate us from what once was owned, others can do the contrary and generate appropriations of the other. This reminds us of a lackness of the desired and subsequently produces a mimetical alienation, envy.

Evil, is this what we suffer from or what we repeatedly pursue? It is maybe what destroys the certainty of the self. This disequilibrium becomes and we fall, fail and illness presents as we suspect from the other´s gaze. In this moment, the artist brings to the surface the obscurities of every day life through irony and satire, through these works he approaches the materials from the procedure of ritual and searches a form that portrays the spirit of time or Zeitgeist. Civilization ends up returning to archaic beliefs that re-emerge when the resources of globalization technique, an its materialist logo-centric approach are not enough to resolve more than speculative propositions, the narcissistic ego looses itself in the labyrinths of gaze embodying a cultural syndrome.