Natural history serves as vehicle for the disclosing of social histories in
the exacting paintings of Fernando Aceves. Informed by taxidermy, the paintings
export taxonomies of extinct animals, revealing figures that inhabit dark,
enclosed and brooding spaces. Creatures that are animal in feature and form
but that appear human in character.
The term ‘animal characteristic’ describes human actions that are
animal-like. This is juxtaposed with a dense set of terminology that refers to
animal behaviour that ‘apes’ human activity. The presence and interchange
of these language systems highlight the level of manufactured structures put
in place to describe behaviour. This projection of human sentiment onto
animals acts as a form of communication in lieu of shared oral language and is
manifested by gesture.
The casting of the cowardly lion in Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful
Wizard of Oz (1900) plays directly into this, offering a powerful proposition
through its inversion of the characteristic of bravery, removing the singular
attribute that in western readings is most readily used to define the animal.
This prescription of symbolist language draws as readily on animals as it does
on humans, in each case exchanging attributes of character and behaviour.
Compounded through literature the symbolism has seen gothic novels readily adopt
signifiers such as crows as bastions of a dark brooding spirituality, conceptions
shaped by formative nineteenth century writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and the
French poet Arthur Rimbaud. The density of figuration and environment contained
within Aceves’s paintings draws on such points of symbolist reference.
Aceves places the figures in a dead space between man and beast. Appearing
as animals their characterization remains perceptively human, for even as beasts
they sit outside of conventions of species removed and extinct. Recognizable
as primate or cirvid (from the deer family) they are simultaneously disconnected,
foreign and alien. The projection of characterization informs systems of social
order, extending Foucault’s theories relating to the construction of the
individual through social context. By re-aligning the behavioural pattern of
animals within recognized ‘human’ social parameters, control is exercised
that reconciles and compensates the misregistration of language.
It is human nature to derive logic and to assimilate disjointed events, or abstract
elements, into coherent systems of order. To transpose codes of meaning
from gesture and behaviour is an extension of this, which Aceves’s paintings
perpetuate whilst inverting such systems of order. By choosing to paint animals,
humans are removed, but their shadow is ever present in the uncertainty of actions
played out in the works. The environments of Aceves’s paintings relate
closely to familiar urban spheres, creating touch points of reference that heighten
the links of the figures not just to human environment and habitat but also to
one that is close to our own. What Aceves creates is an alternate spectre
of reality, parallel and removed, but tangential and in that, recognizable.
Creating fictional, theatrical and cinematic spaces the paintings propagate a
sense of margin and edge. Ambiguous borders of time and place are caught
within marginal interior spaces, deep-set unforgiving nights and darkened vacuous
landscapes.
The primary source materials for Aceves’s paintings are taxidermy animals
found in Natural History museums and the animals he is drawn to are generally
species that are extinct. Within the paintings the fluid and visceral use of
paint cuts sharply against the dead status of the animals, which through taxidermy
are placed in a suspended state of animation, in effect cast as still life objects. In
museums these creatures are often afforded layers of social, political and ecological
context through stage-set environments created around them and in which they
are displayed. Such recreated habitats propagate a narrative constructed to engender
and inform. Aceves’s use of extinct animals from these institutionalized
environments plays astutely on Baudrillard’s ideas of revisions of history,
the redemptive atonement of the past through perpetual replay and the white washing
of monstrosity. The orchestrated presentation of animals within simulated renderings
of their once-was and would-be habitats is not restricted to inanimate creatures
in museums.
A large number of zoos have adopted the closely related strategy of presenting
habitat alongside animal, utilizing ideas of education and visual association
to authenticate an experience of encounter, or in constructing a reading around
Baudrillard, redeeming the atrocity of the displacement of the animal from its
natural habitat.
A recent series of photographs by British artist Richard Billingham collectively
titled Zoo informs the relationship between animal and environment which
is central to Aceves’s paintings. Untitled (Mandrills) 2005 shows
a set of primates in a constructed concrete environment. On the back wall a painted
mural depicts an extensive African savannah landscape, the animals are presented
to the viewer with a visual reference to a supposed natural habitat, an aside
to the all constructed habitat in which they live. Billingham’s photographs
confront this theatre of spectacle disclosing an underbelly of unease whose tension
becomes directly complicit to the brooding undercurrent of Aceves’s paintings.
The controlled internal lighting within the works reflects both the manufactured
stage-set configurations of museum displays and the displaced sentiment of the
impermanent environments that Aceves creates. In Untitled (Mother and
Child) 2006 an ape-like creature is depicted in the back of what appears
to be a van. The animal is turned away holding an infant close to its chest whose
head, in contrast, faces outwards.
While the pose of the figures is classical, it is the light, whose artifice casts
sharp contrasts of shadow that becomes the primary informant of the work. The
prevalent use of orange hues suggests spot lit artificial light. Untitled
(Deer) 2006 shows a member of the Cervidae family seemingly caught in the
glare of a headlight. The animal stands forward as light strikes across the left
side of its turned head and neck. There is ambiguity that points towards contradictory
light sources as a sharply defined ring of light dissipates around the animal’s
right leg, seemingly from a separate source, a torch. As the animal steps
into the frontal beam it is cast from its haunch into darkness that recedes into
a dense landscape of furtive brushstrokes. The creature is uncharacteristically
static. The immobility of the animal’s pose reflects awkwardness connected
to its taxidermy origins, but also suggests something playful and perceptive.
Aceves draws our attention to the moment when an animal is caught in a direct
beam of light, the point at which the animal becomes physically frozen, paralyzed
and unable to move. Further to the displacement of character, Aceves establishes
further equivalence between man and beast.
The paintings appear simultaneously historic and futuristic, primordial and apocalyptic.
The displacement of both time and environment exacted by Aceves draws on Pierre
Boulle’s 1963 book Monkey Planet (that later became Planet of
the Apes).
Boulle’s text proposed an interchange of power between man, primate and
environment through an inversion of evolution, creating a parallel world. It
was not until the 1968 film version that Taylor, one of three astronauts to land
on the planet at the start of the film, discovered the outstretched arm of the
Statute of Liberty emerging from the sand at the water’s edge, realigning
the entire perceived timeframe of that which precedes it. Boulle’s
work nevertheless alludes to such contortion and displacement. What this
offers to Aceves’s paintings is a simultaneously uncertainty and fluidity
construction of time, place and social structure.
While the actions of the characters that punctuate Aceves’s painting remain
elusive and circumspect to our own inference of narrative, they appear to denote
social order and control. The interchange of man and beast, central to our projected
reading of these paintings, is further informed by HG Well’s The Island
of Dr Moreau. The human-beasts created by Dr Moreau are controlled by rules,
mantras, designed to suppress the primary instincts of the hybridized creatures.
Moreau, through provocation, attempts to locate a point of critical mass at which
instinct overrides repression; the concept being that by determining this breakpoint
it ultimately means that it can be controlled.
One of the key factors of Aceves’s work is a social and political narrative
derived through the figurative structure of the paintings. The animals that Aceves
transcribes into his paintings are from museums, they are species displaced from
their natural habitats, and moreover they are extinct. Migrant movements of man
and beast are caused by the external factors that impact on natural environments.
While these can occur through a large number of channels, in the case of both
humans and animals, this has often been due to human intervention, colonization
and conflict.
Likewise these frameworks extend as readily through ideological frameworks as
they do through physical ones. Such notions map onto considerations of human
migration, which, in the case of Aceves’s work, informs the movement of
people from Mexico to America. The social implication of migration between these
two countries confronts a discourse that has historically been informed by issues
of labour and workforce. It is here that the underlying tension of Aceves’s
work emerges, disclosing contemporary narratives through plural points of association,
as ape-like figures in the back of a van appear to recast news stories of illegal
migrants travelling in cramped and squalid conditions, or revisit photographs
released through news channels that mimicked actual prisoner abuse. The
environments of Aceves’s paintings are uncertain and marginal, disclosing
borders that provide a schema for the unmarked territories of world that surround
us.
Text: Charles Danby