Eugenio Dittborn at Alexander and Bonin - New York - Brief Article

Chilean artist Eugenio Dittborn has said that the important thing about his "airmail" paintings is not what they are, but what they do--and what they do is travel. Since 1984, Dittborn has been using the international mail system to send them on journeys around the world. He exhibits the works alongside the envelopes in which they are mailed, emphasizing their status as mobile objects.

Five new airmail paintings were on view in Dittborn's recent show at Alexander and Bonin, each executed on two or more large panels of white cotton duck. To compose them, Dittborn drew, painted, printed or embroidered images and texts onto irregularly shaped patches of cloth, which he then sewed onto the panels that form the paintings' support. The images and texts are appropriated from a wide array of sources, including Chilean newspapers, American magazines, history books and children's drawings. Because the paintings are folded when they travel, they bear gridlike patterns of creases. These creases are in turn overlaid by circles and whorls of black thread stitching. The paintings are also stained here and there with pale, translucent washes of chromatic dye.

From these layered formal elements, the viewer must tease out the complex content. As in Dittborn's previous work, the new paintings comment, with varying degrees of obliqueness, on Chile's often brutal history. But despite grim references to oppression and atrocities, a trenchant, if sometimes macabre, humor permeates his work, frequently resulting from Dittborn's use of unexpected juxtapositions. For example, As a Courier sets a gruesome quote from a 17th-century tract called Truths and Misgivings about the War in Chile (in which indigenous Chileans, referred to as "cruel savages," execute a European squire) alongside a kitschy photograph of a beauty queen.

Dittborn also composes texts of his own which he deploys as captions within the paintings, or as commentary written on the accompanying envelopes. For example, the two-panel El Crusoe is accompanied by an envelope on which Dittborn has written: "Are the airmail paintings letters dispatched by the sender to the recipient, to poison him in the present ever to come? Or are the airmail paintings cloths dispatched by the recipient to the sender ... ?" These gnomic texts serve as a kind of decentering device, forcing the viewer to abandon traditional notions of meaning and enter into Dittborn's-symbolic world. In this world, the only constant would seem to be the state of flux, and meanings shift accordingly: recipient becomes sender, present becomes past, center becomes margin and vice versa. By imbuing his work with evocations of movement, travel and interconnectedness, Dittborn seems to ask viewers to extrapolate beyond Chilean borders when considering the paintings' implications--and, indeed, beyond the borders of sociopoliticai commentary.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group