MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE
UTOPIA PARKWAY Gallery, 12/01/2017
The future is no longer what it was
By
Sergio C. Fanjul
Before the year 2000 arrived, we imagined the future in a different way: flying cars that circulated weightlessly over crystal-clear cities with green grass, geodesic domes full of harmony and very healthy future citizens dressed in pristine white outfits and metallic accessories. Dystopian futures also existed then and now predominate over perfect technological futures: barely habitable megacities, world wars, overpopulation, unbreathable pollution, water scarcity, etc. The futurist theorists of the so-called Technological Singularity (led by Google engineer Ray Kurzweil) predict that by mid-century artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence and humanity will enter a new phase of evolution still unimaginable, jumping from carbon to silicon . There are those who say that machines will dominate us, others that this breaking point will not even occur due to a slowdown in the now exponential technological development. Who knows.
That 'who knows', that tendency to try to predict the future, also that taste for the apocalyptic, seems natural to human beings. But there was a time when, although the nuclear apocalypse was closer than ever, we looked to the future with a certain colorful optimism. It is the one portrayed by the artist Adamo Dimitriadis (Madrid, 1967) in his exhibition Memories of the Future, a pictorial look at a probable future that never materialized.
It was the 1950s: after the victory in World War II, the United States entered a period of well-being based on happy families, a suburb of chalets with gardens, and exacerbated consumerism. Many of the technological developments of the war were beginning to invade homes in the form of household appliances and other technologies (in fact the war had a lot to do with the beginning of electronics and computing that now rule the world). The advertising, bold, happy, sexy, multicolored, sold those advances as coming from the future. Outside of carpets and vacuum cleaners, the Cold War placed the sword of Damocles on the planet.
Dimitriadis, son of a Greek engineer, grew up in the 70s and 80s between the Goyas and Hieronymus Bosch of the Prado Museum and the inevitable influence of seductive capitalism and pop culture, between the May 3 shootings and the attacks of the fearsome Godzilla. A visit to a Magritte exhibition ended up determining his pictorial vocation. Since 2014, he has recreated in his works that spirit of wonder at what were the new mysteries of science and allowed himself to be contaminated by the style of mid-century science fiction productions that, in addition to technological fascination, were a correlate of the fear of Soviet enemy. The red threat was represented in the form of a terrible monster or alien invasion: the powerful Other that was entrenched on the other side of the atmosphere or the Iron Curtain.
In Memories of the Future we observe 12 oil paintings that travel through the coordinates of a hallucinatory scientific realism, already abandoning the pop surrealism that the artist practiced in previous times. Ye ye-looking women handling antigravity technologies, children who happily mess around with nuclear buttons, crazy scientists? performing disturbing experiments with smiling volunteers, all in a retro-futuristic style that, at times, borders on hyperrealistic technique. Ubiquitous atomic structures, vintage televisions, magnetic tapes, illuminated switches everywhere, perhaps memories of the industrial architecture and petrochemical illustrations that Dimitriadis first saw in his father's engineering books. In the background, despite the lively choice of colors (sometimes dreamlike), the striking rays and sparkles, the commercial smile, there is a trace of disturbing menace (reminiscent of that of the satirical cartoonist Miguel Brieva), a representation of a still naive humanity that does not know that it is going to open Pandora's box of hyper-technical dystopias. The Matrix's childhood.
That era was without a doubt the starting signal for this world where capitalist consumption allied itself with scientific developments to bring us all these advances and all these misfortunes. What is clear is that we no longer see (and are not even trying to make us see too hard) a Technicolor future where technological gadgets will provide us with a happy Arcadia. If one thing is seen in the work of Adamo Dimitriadis it is this: that the future is no longer what it was.