On RallitoX who against the light… /Mery Cuesta (En)
On RallitoX who against the light seems to be an alien /Mery Cuesta.
From the book: Manipulated Society
Here are some of the lines of thought that connect with the work of Rallito X, which are necessary in order to understand the artist completely and to understand how he has developed his creations and what defines him as an individual.
1. Modes of the artist
In the comics that Rallito X clusters periodically in his blog we find many of the key points of his persona as an artist. Among those vignettes, one of the arguments that he emphasizes is the repugnance toward the protocols required of artists due to the tyranny of the natural order of contemporary life: the obligation of displacement from nature to the cities in order to prosper as an artist (‘Exodus of Barcelona’), the strategies of marketing his work, the need to project a false image of success… these are things that deeply disgust Rallito X in the current paradigm of the artist.
It’s a non-stop catch up: The Renaissance left us a paradigm of a specific type of artist, the character of the unexpected and irrefutable artist whose genius is exposed in all his creations. This model still survives in an immense inheritance, perpetuated by corporate narratives in the tourism and entertainment industry (figureheads including Dali and Picasso, for example). Most of the public – referred to as “the general public” – still have faith in this model and despise the artists that do not make works based on inspiration coming from preexisting masterpieces and manual skill. They, therefore, spit on the paradigm of the conceptual artist who holds a respect for the concepts imbedded in the art over the object its self and even over him/herself. Those of this mindset despise the radical dematerialization of art.They have no understanding of the premises of the conceptual artist or the contribution conceptual artists have made as liberators of intangible ideas.
The conceptual artist has been converted from genius to swindler, due to the forced introduction of his works – in the shape of residue – to the market. This residue has included the remainders of actions transformed into coincidental annotations scribbled on pieces of paper that the artist has been saving lodged in niches and then elaborately framed and placed in museums or sold. For example, a framed pencil drawing by Bruce Nauman instructing how to mount an electric circuit to a plug and earning thousands of euros completely destabilizes, not only the art market, but also the concept of art. The festive defecation of the 80’s, and the ferocious marketing of the 90’s that dressed the swindler in a suit have caused us to return to a type of nostalgia, not of the paradigm of Renaissance artist concretely, but to it’s manner of object making and modes of production.
The return to painting as a fetishistic object, organic and enigmatic, and to the themes through which photography (the seminal landscape, still life and portrait) came to alleviate the hiding of the broken, general sensibility of discontent, have become economic swindle. The audacity of the nothing reigns as the tendency in fairs, galleries and magazines.
The figure of the urban artist is situated in the twilight territory, and they also suffer from paradigm. While, on the one hand, they are assumed to be the illegitimate child of subversion, anti-system and the underground (three large myths of the urban cosmology that are pressing to be dismantled already!), the reality shows that today their work has been adapted to the format of market. Frequently street actions are used as promotion by an artist intent on entering the gallery circuit. The paradox, therefore, is how to connect subversion with the colors of the sofa in the parlor. But we are idealists… a hole has to exist in which the subversive nature of the art can continue to be possible, without having to be domesticated by the market and the financial survival of the artist. There has to be a way to live on the art, to be able to sell it, but without domesticating it…
¿Who is Rallito X?
A rebellious artist who understands the defined models and has detected its fallacies. He is a sufficiently visionary creator undertaking the search for the hole, that new place. Rallito X is on this quest. The perpetual movement produced by inconveniences determines the intelligence of a creator, i.e. limitations breed creativity. Exemplified in the tragic.
2.Revolving around the tendencies of the market
In his work the existential position that Rallito X has taken as the individual, inevitably addresses certain themes in recurrent ways. The art market is the great hobbyhorse, because – regardless of sales – for someone that is dedicated exclusively to the creation of work, the commercialization of his work returns to the fundamental question of survival. The ability to enter the art market forms a part of his thinking (the domestication of the contents that are included in the work). The nettle rash that this question causes him, have given souring sensitivity to the work of Rallito X through the years. The result, revealed in his work, is worry, the worry to succeed in a market that is merciless to those who they are situated in the margins of consumption. And the worry caused by the sickness of the same market. For this reason, the figure of the indigent one – that objectifies both dimensions of the worry – has been recurrent in his production for a long time.
In what sense is Rallito X identified with the indigent? Inside the rituals of the creation of his work, he once confessed in an interview, how he slept in the rubble of an abandoned industrial building, in order to carry out a work. Rallito X prefers these sordid places, perhaps not only to seek peace far from police harassment, but for the energy that these liberties from harassment remove, a certain halo of limitation and uneasiness. In the market, Rallito X searches in the tenants of the background. Economic precariousness tunes in esthetics and concepts, not only with the places where Rallito X habitually works, but also with the personality of its work. The result is exemplified in his style of painting; it is at times rustic, as if it were the residue of a mental process connected with a marginality that has been assumed. Residue or detritus is not an objective of his work; it is its essence, in the same way that for the artist Jonathan Meese whose works are essentially residues of a process of spiritual eruption. His work has nothing to do with the gadgets marketed by the conceptual artists of the 60 and 70. Meese’s residue is a death rattle, a species of homage to disappearance. In this way the work is connected to Rallito X with the fundamental argument that source of thought and human creativity since the beginning of civilization is contact with the death. His theory is that these are the works of art or “the children” that can secure for us a passport to immortality. Rallito X has to his credit, a lot of both of these things, more death more than being human it’s human medium. As to damned, decadent or romantic, the idea of death attracts him. The residue is feeling more than breathing.
3.Chronicles of an expressed frustration
There is an infernal mechanism that reproduces itself in the work of Rallito X, self-destruction, not so much in the sense of his own person, but in that of the arguments that support him: their own foundations. The comics are a good example of this. In the comic titled ‘Crisis ¿what crisis?’ he develops ideas around the possibility of an ideal community based on generosity and helping others, a type of milk jug story… that cruelty will be trampled subsequently by a species of ‘another I’. With this idea he dismantles himself completely. The work titled ‘Exodus to Barcelona’ is again, an enthusiastic battery of pros slapped down by bad-tempered cons that will, in the end, win the debate. Looking at the issue in the eyes, Rallito X proceeds to revel in the luck of self-destruction, crushing houses of cards that had been erected just on the verge of being finished. We can call this unconscious methodology, “expressed frustration”. It operates in a subterranean way and in a great part through the character of the charismatic penis. The superficial reading that can be made of the profusion of penises in his work is that the artist’s sex life influences his life and work. This can’t be disputed but I think that is more a gesture of challenge to the own ideology of art: ugliness where there should be beauty (we return to the refusal of the paradigm of the artist as generator of beautiful objects), and deliberately anticommercial (who will hang a man with penises coming from his head in his house?). The penis symbolizes self-boycott, the chance of premeditated halitosis. Why is Rallito being hard on himself? Is the suffering the road to enlightenment?
4. Rituals and esotericism
In his latest performances Rallito X himself builds himself up as the prototypical western guru of a new movement “Phallic Repolution”, that “will accelerate our evolution toward the Forth Dimension and will not avoid the torture painful and slow death”. Included in his Manifesto are discourses on the evident ironies that occur after creation and include (with public readings of dialogue, groups of acolytes and proclamations of harangues) rituals of an esoteric nature. The result of these performances is art as residue. With the Manifesto of the “Phallic Repolution”, the artist projects the esoteric resonances of his work, portraying a process of spiritual handling to every rule, finally adopting the role of Teacher in this sarcastic play of the spiritual suggestion: “Create nothing for anyone not even yourself”, it is asserted in the Manifesto, and once more contradicted, destroying the bases of its own words. It states that Rallito X probably has less fear of death than any human Being, in spite of being made serious and stormy by speaking of a “slow and painful” collective death. The esoteric dimension of his work emits a golden brightness that the dense clouds of black tags that are scattered on its creation (poverty, residue and sordidness) do not manage to put out. This brightness is the essence of Rallito X it is his temperament, in terms that always refer to Oscar Wilde at the moment of referring to the vocational artist. The temperament of Rallito X, the advancing toward the light as an alien, is the force of his search. His future in this search must necessarily be developed beyond the strain of the market and the limits of the visible.
