Arte Laguna Award - Honour Mention of the Jury to Cholla
18 October, 2008
“For the provocative nature of his gesture, that can be considered as an interesting and ironic evolution of the myth of abstract and informal art in its theoretical foundations and formal derivations, possible in these terms thanks to an art piece in an epoch of technical reproducibility.”
Art has always been a mirror of times. And by considering our times, we have no reason to laugh. Productions realized by animals are not a novelty: Cholla, the horse whose artwork will be exposed next to the thirty finalist artists, is worldwide considered one of the four most quoted animals.
Congo the chimpanzee – whose paintings are presently sold at public sales together with Andy Warol’s art pieces - was the first animal-artist to be ‘discovered’, during the Fifties: observed by Desmond Morris, Congo impressed Picasso, Dalì and also Mirò, who even proposed an exchange of artworks. The production realized by the group of elephant-artists that paint using their trunks were sold at public sales by Christie’s and exposed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sidney (Australia) and at the Venetian Biennale (Italy).
Cholla is a horse and someone laughs at it because don’t understand that reaffirming the same instinctual gesture that the human being has always been using in order to express itself is a normal human habit.
Abstractionism considers signs and their relations as elements aimed to create an emotional link with the observer; Pollock did not believe in chance, and tried to emotionally control his gesture. With regard to Cholla’s art, we can say that his expression is based on instinctual casualty, even if we cannot deny that his brushstrokes trace marks decodable by means of conceptual instruments learned by vanguards lessons: the animal unconsciousness in opposition to human consciousness.
What is useless in our analysis is the search of a figure or a theme, since it were ridiculous to claim an intentional message of the author. Cholla’s work is to be considered as a result of an action, a product that gives life to emotions, controlled neither by the horse nor by the observer.
Here my last consideration: Pollock preferred to work on a wall or on a floor than at easel, since he like better hard surfaces. In a way, Cholla is more impressionist, at least in his habit, since he finds his inspiration in the open air, next to his portable easel.
Viviana Siviero,
independent art critic and curator,
President of the Jury, painting section