FUTURAMA EXPRÉS
Ángel Mateo Charris
More information about
Fururama Exprés comes from the exhibition Futurama by Ángel Mateo Charris, which could be visited at Sala Verónicas (Murcia) few months ago. Both are about the desire to transit between future and present, to vibrate at the exact point where the two are superposed, to draw a map to nowhere and, by the way, to survive uncertainty.
What a lot of clouds
It is all coming to an end. We live with the feeling of having reached the conclusion of a paradigm, of living at the boundaries of something that cannot be sustained, straddling a frontier. Things cannot carry on like this. We no longer feel as we did before the pandemic, and we have learned that some unforeseen disaster may overtake us at any moment; there is no way back from the degradation that social media have introduced into the ways people love and relate to each other; genuine creativity will be annihilated by AI, etc., etc. These, and other bleak visions of the future foreshadowed in the present, accompany us in our daily lives. They are fatalistic forebodings, baleful feelings, heralded by a conviction that we are living at a pivotal moment, a hiatus. But haven’t we had this same feeling recurrently throughout the course of human history? Haven’t we always been hovering on the edge of angst? Hasn’t every generation believed itself to be the nexus of change? In his memoirs, The World of Yesterday (1942), the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig refers to the vague malaise that can engulf a person in any era. The feeling of uncertainty as a particular sign of our times is based on the current situation of exhaustion of natural resources, so that the capitalist house of cards built on the model of eternal abundance seems to be tottering. The premise of perpetual growth — as physics tells us — is impossible. So it seems we are indeed coming to the end of a cycle, and now it is time to degrow.
This emotional cocktail, served up by the media, seasoned with the pessimistic aftertaste inherent in the human condition and topped off with a little spicy touch added by the fashion for dystopian fiction, is the drink of our times. And its consumption is followed by a feeling of doubt in the stomach and a belch of uncertainty The creations that have sprung from Charris’s imagination, grouped together under the title Futurama, might seem to be visions of the future and the end, but they are actually doubts about the present, visions of all those faults and cracks that the media, conversations and our own existence generate in our daily lives. They are disturbing, idyllic, often hilarious images… but above all, they are doubts, hesitations that make us feel we are floating. “This disorientation is partly due to the loss of a stable horizon”, writes the German essayist Hito Steyerl. “And with the loss of horizon also comes the departure of a stable paradigm of orientation, which has situated concepts of subject and object, of time and space, throughout modernity. In falling, the lines of the horizon shatter, twirl around, and superimpose” (in The Wretched of the Screen, 2014).
Free fall and suspension are excellent metaphors for the state in which we find ourselves when confronted with the decisions we have to make in our unstable present, riddled with uncertainties. Similarly, superficiality, hedonism and the display of happiness are characteristic of the information circulating today in digital culture, conveying a general feeling of floating and wanting to float, heightened by the literal location of information in the levitating space that the web makes possible, that is, in an abstract global sphere where time and space are rescaled. No wonder Charris’s paintings are full of clouds, mists, vapours and haze: like the enchanted heights of Lawren Harris, like the nebulous underworld of Arnold Böcklin, what a lot of clouds there are in Charris’s paintings!
Mery Cuesta & José Óscar López
REVIEWS
Juan Bufill – “Charris, en plena forma”. La Vanguardia, 04/03/2024
