Antonio O’Connell: Después del colapso

From its beginnings to the present day, the artist’s production has a profoundly ironic character. However, what has been said does not refer only to the colloquial use of the word irony, in which something is said with the purpose of expressing a double meaning. In the foundational theory that gave rise to the modern art of the enlightened and industrial era, irony is a more complex concept of the same and is equivalent to circularity, that is, to the fact that a system, process, entity, story or statement, function by integrating and superimposing at the same time (back and forth) apparently opposite or divergent aspects. The choice of irony in art implies the dissolution of the existing hard limits in acts of thought, language and creativity. Antonio O’ Connell’s artistic perﬁl operates, precisely, from the fading of several boundaries: moving, organically, from practice in architecture to the visual arts, the artist moves ﬂuidly from intervention in three-dimensional space to sculptural-objective assemblage, and from there to graphics and toward conceptual-type artifacts.

Después del colapso (After the Collapse), an exhibition project of the artist’s production that offers a sample of his free transit in back and forth -as mentioned above- through disciplines and media, focuses its discourse on the aﬁrmative deconstruction of the signiﬁcance of the idea of ruin. Each and every one of the pieces exhibited in the gallery share and detonate, respectively, an experience of poetic assumption or assimilation of chaos. O’Connell manages to highlight the promising side that shines (almost at the level of a utopian vision) in the ruined or destroyed. One of the most interesting elements of the body of work present in the exhibition, because of its mythical and confessional connotations in relation to visionary-type experiences, is the structure of the architectural viewpoint. In the end, the narrative underlying the sequence of works selected by the curatorship could be interpreted as a celebratory statement -also ironic- at the imaginary threshold of a new aesthetic and social order: “blessed are the visionaries of collapse, for theirs will be the evanescent kingdom of unending transformation”.

Erik Castillo