CIUDAD TERMINAL (TERMINAL CITY)
UTOPIA PARKWAY Gallery, 11th of January 2019
By Carlos Hernández Pezzi
The times of the stroller, the city of Baudelaire's "flâneur", have disappeared forever. Dazzled by Walter Benjamin, we urban planners strive to revive it, but artists place it in other spaces such as those of Giorgio de Chirico, in which melancholy is not traversed by wandering, but by dreaming of cosmological visions and fragmentary sections of what once were. urban spaces where one could walk along avenues of civilized modernity, perhaps absorbed, but still determined to portray oneself in the other.
In living with peers and representations of a landscape reinvented for idealized figurations. The current territory symbolizes, above all, the rust of the scale of the self, a ruin in which we are engulfed by an atavistic fear of facing "The expulsion of the different" (Byun-Chul Han 2018), of what frightens us, of what hurts our ego, of what interferes with what our digital self-portraits proclaim.
Of the fantasies of development and the solitary poetry of the city, anticipated by Edward Hopper's portraits of loneliness, there are now nothing more than silent remains of the splendor of contrasts of sun and contaminated light, which are nothing more than the signs of the climate apocalypse.
Hope in the atom has become the crisis of the planet. The city becomes terminal because its plastic has become iron, hieratic, spasmodic in still photos. Only few artists represent so faithfully this dilution of the urban in the precarious nightmare, in the phantasmagoria of the rational dream interrupted forever in the 20th century. The "fancines" and comics, carried away by the baroque imagery of many superhero films, have supercharged a titanic and megalomaniac imaginary of "Gotham" model cities, as if the future were found in the replicant delirium of "Blade Runner 2049", rather than in the real urban disaster of the ghost town of Detroit.
Dimitriadis knows that we are in a terminal era and represents his urban space in a disturbing tour of Dante's rooms, without giving up the evocation of the ephemeral paradises that he recreates with sharp precision, unique color and texture, as if they were singular representations of the extraordinary beauty of the digital design of a progress lost era . The setting has lost the romanticism of hopelessness. In it, the buildings resemble empty silos, in which life or its interpretation is justified in the neon that illuminates its decay.
They tend to be emblematic manifestos of places that we "recognize" as our own, without realizing that they have already been previously devastated by aerial terrorism, fire, or sand, drought and the deceptive skies of multicolored pollution. I have not found color ranges as disturbing and distressing as these, which the author allocates to the configuration of a future as dehumanized as the views of the desolation of the isolated things. The unworthy, resentful, "solitude of the absent" appears through the sieve of sunlight, twilight, and clouds mistreated by the stale air of our cities, focusing on remains of an incandescent magma, as if they were flashes of lava, a volcano that has been erupting for a long time.
Chimneys, pipes and rockets provide the counterpoint to imaginary leisure "resorts" in the collective subconscious, escape valves from the latent emptiness, from the recognizable hyper-design stores, from the expiration of department stores, from skyscrapers with no other meaning to focus on the oxidation of the pieces of that robotic "kit" in which we have become constricted. Extremely credible and fiercely aesthetically beautiful, Dimitriadis' works put us in front of the mirror: they subjugate us with the force of the abyss. Michel Houllebecq in his "elementary particles" is more there, in the paintings of "Enlargement of the battlefield", than in Phillip Roth's "Atonement" or his bold lament of "Heritage" in which he encourages a mixed hope of strange communion of emigrants with internal exiles.
The terminal city of Adamo Dimitriadis is the accurate expression of the broken splendour of the fictional as an antinomy of the "real", the space that leaves us indifferent to soulless cities and uncompromising painting.. Perhaps two things that catch us, because we cannot solve them, but we can feel them, just as art can see them at the cost of stripping itself of subterfuges and filigrees common in the "plasticine" "blandi-blub" market. This is what the commercial system of consumer art has accustomed us to, of which this exhibition of Dimitriadis's work makes a collateral critical manifesto of his own values.
The amazing thing about the artist's reflection is that he launches to explore the city in its most significant icons, until subvert them as if it were an area flooded by an earthquake, in that spectre of a version of the "titanic" that is at the same time, boat, dock, building and highway, wandering by an unknown sea. Or that it discovers the dual symbols of the reflections of propaganda, shattered in the memory of citizens, to be returned to the raw validity of the messages that power launches, nuclear, weapons; of the disasters of global warming, the war of networks or the disguised developmentisms that are eroding us to leave in precarious a ruinous civilization that approaches to see the precipice of its dehumanized future, without geography, without place and without architecture of the community. Issues that bring us closer to the "Expulsions", which Saskia Sassen (2017) has identified as causing the misery of a population, without identity and without borders, that bids to make a hole in the solitude of hegemony and domination, of hate of the "other" and fear of "everything" that surrounds us.
Dimitriadis shows exceptional aurality. With this work, he shows how you can travel the time tunnel of globalization, - back and forth -, denounce the accelerated collective experience of environmental suicide, and do it with the genuine instruments of art, the intelligent frames of the objects, the stylization of concepts and plastic reflection about the subjects of the world in which we live, expressing, - from elegance -, chaos; teaching - from color - the dark; how the future can be transmuted, - sometimes gray -, of the situation we live in, so masked by the art market that often makes it up.
Malaga, 21th of November 2018