About machines and impersonal modes of looking

When all things converge in an undifferentiated proximity,

the stable centre from which to observe them vanishes.

Paolo Virno, Virtuosity and revolution.

Jose Dumay’s works are a reflection on the sensory alterations that the worlds of physics and technology bring about to our practice of  discerning and perceiving reality. The artist expands on this problem with metallic coloured lines over colour-saturated backgrounds in paintings portraying the Atlas hadron collider.

By means of such a technological reference, the artist establishes a graphic relational space carrying codes and messages totally detached from their anthropological substrate. The paintings, thus, no longer evoke a setting habitable by man, but rather point, in their graphical configurations, to a topological system void of room for humanity.

Jose Dumay’s paintings situate us, the observers, in a visual universe in need a post-human glimpse. It appears as if the artist is seeking to fill the exhibition room with painted surfaces carrying their own ontology, or, so to speak, technical beings that show up in their particular modes of: existing, dwelling and signifying relative to our world.

Jose Dumay’s works are, from a pictorial figuration standpoint, an allusion to the problem of the machine as a semiotic complex, or as a dominant fetish in contemporary society.

As such, the artist presents paintings that portray, by means of metallic coloured lines over colour-saturated backgrounds, the Atlas hadron collider, a mega-machine designed by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) to recreate the post Big Bang instant under controlled conditions. The alluded to machine overruns our imagination as it exposes, by virtue of its workings, the physical principles at the source of who we are and what we know.

Atlas thus becomes the machine of all machines, that is, the device that affords man access to the non-human, or mechanistic, origins of mankind. Without drawing further attention on the CERN experiment in its entire scope and complexity, suffice to mention that, by accessing the experimental results as pictorial images, we are set in a visual universe which calls for a post-human glimpse from us as observers. What could we then expect from such a post-human gaze other than the action of seeing, devoid of any expectation for representation?

Jose Dumay is not bent on using his images for depicting the problems he presents us with, nor on giving to his images any sort of iconic or symbolic status. His motivation is instead for the painted surfaces in the exhibition room to gain the status of bearers of their own ontology. We are pointing here to technical beings arising in their particular modes of existence; dwelling; and, significance relative to our world.

Super-structures becomes then a show sustained, not so much by the exhibited works, as by the workings of the aesthetic autopoietic systems contained herein. The latter clearly stemming from the modular setting decided by Dumay for his works, from where out of each frame a machine emerges, as if generating or replicating its own identity. We would be wrong therefore to see the works as mere representations of mega-object fragments under varied perspectives. This would divert from the artist’s visual representation model based on cloning.

To understand this shift, or jump, in the image replication phenomenon from a so called technical-based copying to a so called genetically-based copying, we ought to mention that Jose Dumay comes from the world of advertising. This fact is far from immaterial, and points to how the artist’s sensibility was shaped in an intense dialogue featuring artificial, fictional and mass-media contemporary images. As a matter of fact, the artist derives his authority to understand, or rather to connect with, the bio-aesthetic future of the visual world, from his work experience with the industrial visual fabric which, in its indefinite expansion, invades the public and private space; and, from the attentive observation of the motion of semiotic fluid through endless displays.

This bio-aesthetic neologism provides an opportunity for naming or pointing to a period when images, due to their technical complexity and worldwide circulation, have evolved into an independent and autonomous ecosystem relative to the function assigned by man to those images. In this new context, the image and the machine in Dumay’s work, both think and exist in and of themselves; they propose questions and complex answers; and, they inhabit and model reality under parameters that escape our psychical or personal-centric structures. The images thus created by Dumay should not be viewed from the standpoint of the self who persists in reasoning in terms biography and identity. His paintings are a demand, or a request on our part, to detach ourselves from our anchors to history and storytelling – as reflection -, and to experience a way of existing rooted, no longer in the object-figure, but in the collection of information flows forming a pliable and immaterial support that we have become accustomed to label “one self”.

Lastly, we ought to stress some of Jose Dumay exhibition’s inherent complexity, which results from displaying the sensible effects of capitalism under, so called, cognitivist and pre-formative dimensions. This new economic system emphasises the non-materialistic nature of the production systems and promotes the development of fluid, or flexible, identities. Both dimensions presuppose the emergence of modes of experiencing which are hybrid and diffuse in nature; and assume the proliferation of ways of being that fluctuate between integration and disintegration. As a result, devising an aesthetic apparatus to typify the glimpse we ought to adopt in such maiden conditions, turns into an endeavour rich in political connotations.

 Mauricio Bravo Carreño

Visual artist and professor

Universidad de Chile