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Let's say that is already January 1st. We have celebrated Christmas, we have welcomed the New Year, and the party is over. Leftovers, empty bottles, confetti, wrapping paper over the floor, and balloons, lot of balloons...
Now is the time to clean and tidy up. Return to normalcy. We have eaten and drunk beyond the limits of several capital sins -gluttony, lust, greed...- which would get us on the boat of Charon on the way to hell. We have put up and taken down our holiday decorations, we have tidied our spaces, and ideally, we have saved the décor to use another year. We have wasted and we have bought Christmas gifts, some handy, most of them useless. We have wrapped all these gifts in a lovely, shiny, flashy paper, which hints at something special inside, and we have ripped and throw away all this paper again. And all that without any remorse.
Is the function of this paper not curious and paradoxical? In the simplest words we could define it as "paper to make something pretty" (and to be thrown away later, we will add in brackets).
This pretty paradox attracted the curious eye of the artist Gemma Gené, who with hyper-realistic paintings and drawings, brings to canvas, paper, and panels, some contemporary still-lifes and an absolute reflection of the current ridiculous consumerism.
Her line is dedicated and obsessively detailed. With it she perfectly depicts that characteristic shine of the silver party paper. You almost wait to see yourself reflected in the oil, graphite, and ink of her work as if they were mirrors. You resist the urge to open the package and the impulse to tear the paper to reveal what it hides.
A nice ridiculousness
GEMMA GENE
CURATED BY LAURA JIMÉNEZ IZQUIERDO
Biografía:
Gemma Gené is an architect and visual artist from Barcelona, Spain, based in New York. She moved to the United States to earn a Master in Advanced Architectural Design at Columbia University. In 2014 immediately upon graduation she joined Steven Holl Architects until she focused on developing her artistic studio work.
She previously obtained a degree in architecture at La Salle University in Barcelona, Spain, and expanded her education in Architecture and Fine Art at Escola da Cidade, São Paulo, Brazil and University of California Berkeley. She is an award-winning painter and published illustrator. Her work focuses on wrapped objects and foil balloons. The series “unapologetic paintings” is a collection of realistic paintings and drawings of wrapped objects. In this series the object is hidden and the only thing showing it is it’s skin or it’s wrapping and it can only be revealed by the user’s imagination. She relies on urban art as a way to make her work accessible. Part of her three-dimensional work shares her architectural language and is a study of volume and geometry using stone, concrete and 3D print. Her work has been shown in New York at the Accessible Art Fair, The Rush Arts Gallery and Figment NYC amongst others, Barcelona and Madrid.
She is best known for her online comic 157ofgemma where she narrates in an ironic fashion her life with her inseparable pug Mochi that has a very strong following on social media.
She follows the most pop tradition: the impersonal and daily objects of Warhol and the shiny and kitsch balloons of Jeff Koons. She is also fascinated by the concept of wrapping of all different types of objects, such as the monuments and landscapes of Christo and Jeanne Claude.
Her training in architecture reveals itself, only to unexpectedly be rebelled against. The very geometric and structural work with which she shows all kinds of objects wrapped in silver paper (bottles, glasses, high heels, hand bags, fruits and even lobsters) the artist decides to launch an attack against the precepts of seriousness and elegance of architecture. Why can’t we, in an "intellectual" and "elegant" environment, say that we sometimes enjoy shiny and kitsch things? And why can’t we describe it as "nice" or “pretty”?
The wrapping paper is nice. Balloons are nice. If its function and nature is "to make something nice", why can’t we admit that they are?
In the sweetest and most innocent way, sarcastic and clever too, Gemma revolts against the cynicism and hypocrisy of elegance. However she also protests in a deeper sense this commodity fetishism of this consumer society.
In a universe where more than ever the contemplation and the respect for the present are harder to come by, Gemma pauses before these still-lifes of waste. She meditates on them and gives to them some minutes of attention as to value their completely meaningless beauty. Or, paradoxically, very meaningful. Because as we said, these shiny balloons and wrappers, superficial and cheesy, are one of the most faithful portraits of this world of impertinence and overspending that we live in.
We have imagined that it was January 1st. However, we could talk about the 26th of December, the 7th of January, the 15th of February, the day after your birthday, any Sunday, any Monday. We could talk about any day on which it seems that we leave a trail of plastic and debris, instead of tracks on the ground; about any moment where unconsciously and without regret we achieve the contemporary Descartian slogan of Barbara Kruger, 'I shop therefore I am'.
Nevertheless, this is neither a pessimistic work, nor a text about Christmas. Not at all. This is only one invitation to think about what really matters, to laugh at hypocrisy, to be conscious about the absurd consumerism and overspending, to enjoy the present and live without a hurry, to be innocent and appreciate nice things. Or are those star balloons, which shine as transparent water and float in silence on the Gemma’s canvas not nice? In fact, they are very nice.
Laura Jiménez Izquierdo
Diciembre 2016
