A nova promessa: Daniel Escobar

Home ownership, the brand new car, expensive clothes, a unique work of art - how long does your material dream last before it becomes ruins? In The New Promise, Daniel Escobar cynically discusses the illusionistic tricks of advertising, presenting them as one of the drivers of the fast paced consumption and disposal trend, which sustains - and devours - the current world. Following an artistic tradition started in the 1960s, his proposals arise from observations of the city and its truncated dynamics, the blunders of which allow conceptual works of art to operate as actual interventions outside the medium of art. 

This individual exhibit comments on the pathetic side of our human condition reduced to consumers in the post-Fordism era. Its title carries an irony to the very system of contemporary art, which has become a mass provider of objects of high plastic appeal and low discursive density, enshrining old artists and discovering young talents according to the curatorial trends of events such as the Biennials of Art. 

The New Promise is an offshoot of the project Your Place is Here, Your Time is Now held in May this year at Santander Cultural in Porto Alegre. There, Escobar started from the analysis of a vast range of advertising material from real estate market releases, in order to delve into the illusionistic language of marketing and to strip the fictitious beauty offered in advertising campaigns. At that occasion, the piece Advertise Here was first presented, a full-scale outdoor panel available inside the institution as actual rental ad space. 

By being reassembled on the exterior facade of Zipper Gallery, Advertise Here reverses the norm once again, since the commercial transaction is not actually completed in a place where, in principle, it could be. Advertising media is thus presented as an intervention in the architecture and in the urban environment, and - even if devoid of its primary function - stands as an exception in the public space of the city of São Paulo, where public outdoor ads have long been banned by law. Exposed in the street, the sign advertises itself while asserting the nature of the Gallery, and unravels artistic strategies to re-invent ethical codes and to create privilege mechanisms through art. 

This individual exhibit includes other art works related to the Porto Alegre exhibit such as The Real Estate Speculation - acrylic boxes partially filled with replicas of pieces of children's construction games, made out of the paper from real estate market brochures - and panels from the series lending its name to this individual exhibit, the New Promise, where the artist explores how advertising empties language, by embroidering - with gold thread on lottery slips - phrases extracted from advertising campaigns. Of the works executed for that occasion, we have the emblematic LED sign The Shorter History and the magical panel All of Our Desires, which provides a pictorial landscape of illusory fireworks made ​​out of thousands of confetti cut out from discarded billboards. In a way, this piece summarizes the exhibit. 

Daniel Escobar produces from the semiotic power of images and objects, balancing pop visuality with elaborate concepts, in art pieces generated by industrial, technological or manufacturing processes. Creating well finished and aesthetically pleasing works, the artist allures viewers through form, to soon after insert them in the critical universe of his speech, located far beyond simple appearance.

Daniela Labra