information / gallery

Three photographers from Trujillo, Perú

by Jorge Villacorta Chávez

In Perú, in the field of the visual arts, Trujillo has occupied a place of prominence due to its hosting three art biennials in 1983, 1984 and 1985. These events were the only occasions in the decade of the 80s in which the arts briefly reached the institutional sphere in Peru. On the other hand, the city boasts the Superior National School of Fine Arts “Macedonio de la Torre”, which trains painters by placing emphasis on the acquisition of a solid mastery of the trade. The local art market is virtually non-existent, and the young artists have to try their luck in Lima.

The teaching of photography is relatively new in Trujillo and occurs within the context of the Mass Communications career at the University. Photographic material is not easy to find in the shops in the city, so the photographers have to travel to Lima for supplies. But one thing that can be stated is how from these group of photographers, young artists from Trujillo have gained status organizing frequent group or collective art exhibitions.

Alice Vega, Jano Cortijo and José Carlos Orrillo, the three Trujillo photographers joined together to take part in Pacto con el momento incierto (Pact with the uncertain moment) have grown, worked and found prominence together in a cultural space in which, at the time, photography took second place to painting, although there cannot be said to be an awareness of avant-garde trends among the painting options of their contemporaries. In the works of Alice Vega, Jano Cortijo and José Carlos Orrillo, on the other hand, we find postures that clearly reveal the contemporary slant of their explorations, taken from the individual viewpoint of each one, and also as queries and judgments of their position in a periphery experienced as a factor that is by no means neutral for their work.

The cases of Alice Vega and Jano Cortijo are more similar to those visual artists who use photography as a means of expression. They have seldom worked on the photographic image outside of a context of installation or proposals of sculptural objects. Jano Cortijo is the most determined installation artist of the three, and he has exhibited his spatial arguments both in galleries and in domestic locations. In Cortijo there is a special sensibility towards everyday spaces and the objects, once defined and situated, that define these spaces. In the end there is nothing banal about these spaces, as he submits things to a process of stripping them of their use and function so that they take on a different meaning which he conveys to the observer. His are the glance and the attitude of one who works with emblems, and it is in this dimension that his proposal takes on a special allegorical slant. This is where the strength of a work like Los días solo se suceden (Days just follow each other) resides: in it he has only worked with elements taken from different household spaces.

In his installation works, since he introduces tensions with reference to the usual background, as we have mentioned above, he paves the way for a mise en scène of our individual and collective identity. Hoy día (Today) is a work that assumes that, through an approach capable of articulating fact and fiction, a new kind of sensitive information can be created, permitting the personal to be inserted within the social and vice versa. The furniture chosen sustains the presentation of a universe of portraits of women of all ages, but it is the conjunction of portraits that transforms the reading of furniture: appropriated by the artist and stripped of its everyday use, it can be nothing other than a kind of monument to maternity.

In No tienes ni la menor idea (You haven’t got the slightest idea), an installation of photographic images in black and white and color, Cortijo seems to be playing with the idea of following the rhythm and the inflections of thought in the features of a face, but his game turns out to be a different one in the end. The installation spatially establishes an elaboration about perception and the impossibility of separating a sensorial response from the logical steps of language that configure thought. The very materiality of the images in their diversity of size suggests itself to the viewer as a kind of jigsaw puzzle: each one of them contains a fragment of face, but by means of partial repetition and superposition, the face escapes from them and eludes retention and fixing in the memory.

These three photographers from Trujillo in Perú present their works with the conviction that the experience of change, brevity and uncertainty, processed and incorporated into them, is the origin of a vision that escapes the commonplace.

presentation text for the catalogue of the exhibition “Pact with the uncertain moment” Lima, Peru, 1999