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If the agitated century that we already buried has left us any inheritance at all, it is a series of death records for the painting, for the novel, for the cinema. Nevertheless, all these media and forms seem to enjoy perfect health if we pay attention to the newspapers and the internet, since in spite of such desolate panorama, we, the young and the old (some) continue frequenting galleries, commenting on novelties at bookstores (whether we read them or not) and standing in long lines in order to assist to movie premieres. Nobody will be able to deny that the internet has come to reinforce voyeurism and visual consumption of the contemporary spectators in unsuspicious forms, sometimes subtle, sometimes scandalous.
But there is another announced death which reality has taken charge of denying. Since the era of collective transport and the jet propulsion the automobile had its sentence suspended. We could believe that in this millennium of deeply legitimate ecological worries, often strange and contradictory in form, though, - planting corn to produce ethanol could result being anti-ecological - our consumption fetish and the individual prestige of the twentieth century - the automobile - is about to serve its sentence or at least to convert itself into a household appliance. If this turned out to be true, the loss of the intern combustion motor would not be enough to bury Daimler and Ford’s dream of putting four wheels to the will and the desires of every inhabitant of the earth. All premature death will be denied shortly by thousand of automobiles that increase the lines on the freeways and the streets of the world and specially the newly opened streets in
India and China, whose inhabitants are about to join en mass the collective dream of autolocomotion.
This is how it happens with all the pretended funerals of our ways of expression - in general there is more roleplay than funeral- and the truth is that the painting as well as the automobile enjoy good health on the streets, at home, in the internet and thanks to Alejandra Phelts’ work now in the art gallery as well. In her Cart Series Phelts develops two main lines of exploration of a heroic and at the same time ironic vision of the individual transport. The “portraits” and the “collective scenes”. Besides a humor and freshness of the chromatic proposal which surprise us as it is about a means of transportation which few of us consider being capable of little more than merely commercialism and consumption, Phelts saves or reinvents a subtle and simple perspective which a lot of us shared when we got into or even drove our first automobile: the always fresh, though mostly forgotten novelty of movement. Among the texts of the theory of cinema it is told that the invention of this medium owes as much to the photography as is does to the automobile. The private transport turned the continuous transformation of the bucolic and urban landscape before the eyes of a traveler or the driver of an automobile to be a direct precursor of pan and swish shots, two fundamental camera movements for any film that claims to be dynamic. Therefore, film and automobile are tied together since their beginning in this modern obsession for movement and of course in their most extreme incarnation, in their passion for speed. It’s this connection between movement and image to which Phelts aspires. We are aware that the painting is nurtured by instants rather than by sequences, but the color and the textures together as well as the suggestive titles reshape a mental image of traveling: “Susana in First Gear”, “Fire at 1000 km/h”, “White Face and Speeding” prove to invoke the notion of traveling the space with effort or under the influence of adrenaline. Beyond the virtuous usage of techniques and materials, fabric and wood, acrylics and sands, these pictures of the series retake the possession of the visual resources they share with photography, cinema and comic. The freshness of Phelts’ proposal is located just in this omnivorous and free re-composition of the visual form.
Beyond useless mourning and nostalgia of the “trapped and hopeless” painting which supposedly has lost the long battle against today’s visual media, Phelts celebrates, invokes, incorporates and re-owns the dynamic resources of comic strips and the photography under the creative demand and plastic precision of the painting. Here at an equidistance of Lichtenstein and Warhol, it is not about celebrating the object itself as a triumph of consumption and of the new form of the object and the optic of the mass, the fabric and the wood, they celebrate the car with a spirit of reinvention and play in Klee’s style. Sure, there is neither a search for a phenomenon as in the “Ghost’s Room” nor the heavenly fugacity of certain “Angel”, but the chromatic variation and the successive and entirely subjective re-composition of its background colors in “Automarine” and in “Vivaldi’s Fugue” suggests that apart from the metaphorical and imaginative game between title and theme, there is a formal quest for color and its potentials. The car as a concrete object of commerce and consumption implies the vicarial utilization of color as point of insertion in order to satisfy the “client’s taste”. However, in these two cases Phelts’ cars have reverted the impulse of marking the object with color for their commercial packaging and have pushed it - with a gesture of externalization of the subjective - towards the space of the composition. The chromatic progression of shades of green in “Escape” absorbs or redefines completely the realistic and figurative function of the car’s body work. The figures of cars in a discrete line towards the lower part – which against all rules of perspective increase in size although they also loose weight
in the most upper part of the picture - have been absorbed by the progression of color from the darkest in the base towards the clarity of the yellow in the upper part and also in a more subtle way due to the dynamic of the textures which overcome the two elements before mentioned. Thus “Vivaldi’s Fugue” translates the sense of progression in the music to a chromatic “speech” in which the physical world of metal, rubber and seats has been projected towards a space of interior parallel to the show it contains. To make it clear, the referral to Vivaldi leads us to think that it refers to the common act and – sometimes harmful for one’s health - of extending the “showtime” (as Debord calls it) to the working time in the car. In Tijuana, as well as in New York and probably in Mumbay, the passenger and the driver listen to music and turn the time of the journey into time of entertainment, or at least they try.
Unlike the rhetorical and/or academic death of the “author” by the hands of the French post-structuralists, or the death of the film according to Greenaway or certain tendencies of the cinema Dogma, the automobile refrains from dying in peace and returns with fury, not as an appliance anymore but as a consumption and show symbol.