Issue # 11 Ralph Bauer
Curated by: Nicolás Gómez Echeverri
The title of this text is: https://www.instagram.com/baueralphbaueralph/
The medium is
They are pencil drawings on paper, which are photographed and published on his personal Instagram account. They are essential: pencil on paper. In continuous, precise and confident lines - of someone who has learned to draw by drawing, whose trained pulse knows how to carry the weight of the pencil, and who masters the linear intention at the beginning and the end of his ideas - he draws almost every day a situation, an anecdote, a possibly mundane relationship, emotional, intellectual or mathematical , carried out by a nameless character. The character is always the same, limited to the norms of his representation: snub-nosed, neckless, hairless, clothe-less, always displayed in profile, with hands and feet, like a dummy limited to a single line and point that is the eye. The character has no name, so we can call him (¨), or whatever.
(¨) exists as the inescapable result of the correlation between the brain and eyes and hand, mind, observation and medium, of ideas, signs and tools. (¨) is a drawing. The drawing is a way of thinking that is not dramatically or ideologically proclaimed due to the same simplicity the pencil and paper resource poses; drawing is free and independent of assumptions or presuppositions. To give oneself the opportunity to draw is to give oneself the opportunity to activate thought and recognize oneself in other possible dimensions of human identity: such as a gesture, a pulse, affection, as data, a number , as a sign, as a communication phenomenon. As a state of thought, it seems that drawing is already an exceptional luxury in "an age that does not think", as the Mexican philosopher Adriana Yáñez would say. In thinking by drawing or drawing thought, fundamental questions are reached: What are we? What are we like? Why are we? And, in the case of the fore-mentioned drawings, these ancient metaphysical questions are transferred to the plane of current digital existence. In the world that Adriana Yáñez describes, "in which thinking has become politics, demagoguery, bureaucracy [...] ruled by officials where ideas have fallen prey to their own small and petty logic", it is a relief to know to someone who, through the stories of a pleasant and elemental creature drawn by pencil on paper, escapes the spectacle of high definition and filters , to dare to think of ourselves within the same medium in which we intend to make life something more spectacular than itself. And get likes.
The medium is him
Contemporary art is standardized and uniform. The same is always expected of artists: fill out a checklist of achievements predetermined by the mandatory marketing promo (e.g. participation in fairs, biennials, residences, gallery representation, participation in select curated group exhibits and countless individual, large-scale formats ) . This path to success is encapsulated in the screens of social networks. We then see that the artist "no longer has time to become a continent of his own life at least from one that is not stereotyped and the same as all the others" —paraphrasing César Aira.
Following the commission to highlight work that I consider relevant in the context of the pandemic, I am inclined to introduce Ralph Bauer's Instagram account, which also has a modest number of followers. Ralph is German and has lived in Peru since 2007. He has a postgraduate degree in design from the Jan van Eyck Academy (Maastricht, The Netherlands). He is a partner in a design and communication firm and independently has written and published some visual and conceptual books, in addition to having participated in some art exhibits. He always draws, he draws everything and he draws for everything. He really likes the work of a German self-taught artist Tomas Schmitt, who was trained among the Fluxus. Around 20 years ago, Ralph conceived in drawing a nameless character that we can refer to as (¨), and who since his first debut on an IG post on September 27th , 2018, has limited his virtual life to diagrams, spheres, arrows, graphics and the serial orthogonality of the network. Ralph Bauer's Instagram account is not the account of a normalized contemporary artist. It is the narrated project of the life of (¨), which in turn lives the life of Ralph and translates it into the sequential parameters of the social network. There are days in which his scenes occupy the extension of the painting, others in which the painting itself is divided into grids and these into sequences or categories that are organized within. There are days when it does not appear, because it does not need to, and then we see the constant grids, lines, contours or symbols that raise questions about digital identity reduced to established geometric structures.
In the last three months, (¨) has developed an intense and conflictive relationship with a round shape with strange antennae that we logically assume to be a Coronavirus. But it is not precisely this particular conjunctural episode that allows me to highlight it as an important work in the context of the pandemic. I want to point out the birth and evolution of a total, constant, daily project that, before the obligatory social distancing, already voiced our digital damnation. As a good designer, Ralph reacts to the complexity of language and reality, and deciphers his codes in order to direct them to simple and overwhelming shapes. (¨) is a channel for this search, to decipher and understand the sovereignty of the visual structure of Instagram: a grid made up of exact squares organized in rows of three blocks, and through which our life must appear to be more seductive than life itself. Likes, please.
The medium is the message
Finally, it is about the illusion of love, which operates through a tangle of implicit interlocking contracts that allow hearts to be given and received, as a palliative mean meant to calm the mutual anxiety brought by the dissatisfaction with reality. The medium by which hearts are transferred is through reacting to information from rectangular windows, showing assumptions of happiness, triumph, and political correctness. The unbearable word Coronavirus comes hand in hand with the even more tiresome "Re-invent yourself” , which in turn also suggest the necessary creativity in order to make digital resources one's own and to be able to succeed in their structure. Ralph Bauer's Instagram account is, all of it, a great question about this destination. It is a reflection on the medium, within the medium itself. The medium itself is form and content, without the need for shows (specters and fallacies); just an adorable line, which is drawn, which is thought. More likes.
Nicolás Gómez Echeverri (B. Bogotá, Colombia)
Artist, researcher and curator. B.A degree in Art at Los Andes University (Bogotá) and a Master's degree in Art History at Goldsmiths University (London). Since 2018 he is the Executive Director of the MAC - Museum of Contemporary Art - Lima. He has worked as a curator for many institutions in Colombia, such as Museo Nacional (Bogotá), Museo La Tertulia (Cali) and Banco de la República Museum (Bogotá), where he was chief curator from 2014 to 2018. He regularly writes and publishes research and critique papers on Latin American modern and contemporary art.