During the Bogotá Art Biennale, the first kiss captured in this giant and amorphous mass installed like a meteorite on the orphan pedestal previously occupied by the figure of Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, in the square of the University of the Rosary, was that of its own architect: Iván Argote. He would have preferred another space, because he respected the political act in which the statue of the conqueror was toppled, but then he felt that intervening in this space was adding a little good humor to the social advocacy, without diminishing its importance. “I have a very critical but joyful and fun social outlook, with affection for others. » Thus began a kiss-a-thon during which the public was invited to exhibit their demonstrations of affection for otherness.
From the Biennale, Argote flies to New York then to Paris. This distracted child, “like in the clouds”, with an inner world bigger than an amusement park and who later became the fun and provocative teenager who studied graphic design at the National University, is today an accomplished artist who works with a team of six people in his studio in Paris, a city he considers his base, although he has lived several seasons in New York, Los Angeles and Barcelona, since he left Bogotá, 20 years ago years. Graduated from the Don Bosco school, which encouraged the technical high school and where he became fascinated by letters. together and typography, which is why he started studying design when he was just 16 years old. “That’s where I fell in love with photography and spent more than half of my studies in a darkroom. They allowed me to study a Fine Arts subject related to photography and that’s how I ended up simultaneously specializing at the University’s Film School.”
At that time, Argote imagined himself as a cinema animator underground. Actress Cristina Umaña asked him to take paparazzi photos of her and her partner at the time, director Camilo Matiz, an exercise that resulted in an artist’s book that the actress then gave to her husband. “Some time later, Camilo called me to work as an assistant director, while I worked on my personal projects to send my portfolio to the University Art Fair, of which I won the first prize, which consisted of a round trip ticket to any destination. »
And so he came to Paris with the intention of learning French – he now speaks five languages – and obtaining one of the sixty places for which around 2,000 candidates are fighting at the École des Beaux-Arts –Fine artsfor those who know –. “I focused on creating and sustaining my savings by eating pasta with a little Roquefort. » Argote mainly creates conceptual art and urban videos based on street experiences with strangers, but he quickly attracts the attention of his first gallery owner: Emmanuel Perrotin. “It was a surprise when he emailed me three months after the day I approached him and told me he didn’t work with students. Luckily, they took me on as the gallery’s mascot.”
Before this first exhibition, in 2011, Argote filmed videos with strangers who he asked to sing him happy birthday because he was an immigrant and had no one to celebrate with, or begged them, instead of giving him money, to receive a coin for him – to play with uprootedness, humor and affection. Then he wins a competition to exhibit at the Palais de Tokyo, and decides to start sucking cock more seriously. “I set myself the task of doing something that had more of a connection with what I was missing: my family and my country. As my parents were activists and must have been underground before I was born (1983), I made a sort of mockumentary in which I captured these experiences but I also invented others linked to the interventions on the monuments.” It was at this time that the question of monumentality captivated him and he began working with another of the most important galleries in Latin America, Vermelho.
He then exhibited at the São Paulo Biennale and, among many of his achievements – thanks to which he is preparing future interventions in public spaces in Taiwan, Dallas and Berlin – the city of New York invited him to install one of his best-known works on the High Line in Manhattan. It is about Dinosaur: the colossal and hyperrealistic sculpture of a pigeon measuring six meters and weighing a ton, with which people end up taking a photo, ironically admiring this kind of pariah animal, all to show that we are capable of having empathy with the marginalized.
“I had already done some things with videos of pigeons and had observed them since I began to be interested in monuments and statues. For me, it is a monument to the undesirables, even if over the 4,000 years that we have shared with them, it has gone from being a messenger, to a deity, to an enemy, to a savior, to loved, to hated… Dinosaur He will soon fly to Vienna, as part of a private collection, but we are waiting for him to first take a little tour of the world,” says Argote with the funny laugh with which he speaks of all his projects, materialized with the help of animators, designers, sculptors and managers which operate as in an industrial factory, given the scale of their work.
He is currently presenting his second exhibition at the Albarrán Burdais gallery, in Madrid. In the first, he made a video of the statue of Christopher Columbus being torn from its pedestal and taken out of the city, then exhibited in a garden of the Venice Biennale, already eroded and inhabited by plants. “Now I have repaired all the cracks in the platforms or paving stones with colored cement in the streets surrounding the gallery, to make these rivets a kind of mini monuments on which I affix empathetic sentences with a stamp.” With voluminous and almost brutalist installations like this rice with feijoada scattered in giant pieces in an exhibition hall; the pair of human-sized boots that appear to be those of a giant monument; the immense seesaw for playing from top to bottom between several, or the obelisk of Place de la Concorde cut into pieces in an exhibition in Canada, Argote this time orients itself towards the working-class and urban exercise of patching, transforming it into a poetic act of social repair documented in the video installation exhibited in the gallery itself.
But we know that we have before us a true work of art even though what we feel when we see it is much more moving than what the artist or the curator of the exhibition has to say about it. This is what strangers feel when they are interested in Argote’s work and what sparks conversation with him: an immense curiosity to see each of his samples live and to experience them in a personal and untransmittable way, even when they are video pieces, because the artist records much of his work.
In his voice, we feel the warmth of an artist who does not over-intellectualize everything, who understands that so-called high culture thrives on the popular and on playing with others; an artist who has fun, but who takes his work seriously enough to give it transcendence and substance, even if his work is a social and therefore political act in which the notion of inequality and irony will always be present through what he calls radical tenderness.
Brother of a deputy, son of a municipal councilor and director of a public school, married to a conservative and father of two babies who also led him to reflect on the dimension of things and the conventions of language – as well as on the importance of forming a critical mind from childhood and recovering the idea of protest as a creative act – Argote is very fond of sound engineering and makes a loop a few agreements The mouse for an intimate and nostalgic video he is working on. When I ask him what he thinks of this famous quote from Margaret Atwood, who says that being interested in an artist because you like their work is as stupid as being interested in geese because you like foie gras, he replies ironically: “I don’t know if I’m as interested in knowing about geese as I already know about pigeons. I’m interested in art because it’s like doing philosophy without having to write.”
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