Reutilizing and recycling things for the purpose of art is one of the responsibilities of an artist, according to Argentine Maximo Gonzalez, whose current show at Istanbul’s Artane Art Gallery proves his attachment to his principles.
Even ideas are reusable, Gonzalez said, adding that it was possible to turn ideas into “valuable” things.
Gonzalez working on devalued money banknotes
Change matters to Gonzalez. “Everything changes and everything matters. Your position, your ideas, and your life everything changes within time and there is constant movement; that’s why I am focusing on change,” he said during an interview.
Every change affects something else. The best thing about his show is that the audience can witness how change happens, how he can recycle and reutilize materials and ideas and how everything is interconnected.
Money is a particularly good material to recycle for art, Gonzalez said, adding that he thought money reflected the story of countries.
Gonzalez tells stories from the past by using banknotes and coins. For example, in one of his works, Gonzalez tells the story of the major currency devaluation that occurred in Mexico. Originally, the centers of the 10-, 20-, 50- and 100-peso coins were made of pure silver. When the peso was devalued in 1994, however, these silver coins became worth more than the value they were nominally signifying. Consequently, the government started getting hold of these coins and replacing them with less valuable materials. By 2000, it was almost impossible to find one of these original coins. Many that do come across the older coins are advised to either collect them or melt the center and sell the silver for its current price.
Gonzalez found those coins, which lack the silver in the center, and used them in his work titled “Weight.”
“The important thing is that my work titled ‘Weight’ also signifies balance, and if you move one of the coins, then all the balance is damaged,” said Gonzalez.
Gonzalez further combines his love for nature with recycling. This not only reflects his love for nature, but also his responsibility for it.
Since he was a child, he always enjoyed drawing and painting trees. One of the significant pieces in the gallery is the money tree, which Gonzalez also created using old banknotes.
“Money Tree” is the conjunction of tree different interests: his pleasure for drawing trees, his interest in currency as a material and his worries about the preservation of nature. “The ‘Money Tree’ makes an obvious reference to the saying ‘money does not grow on tree,’” said Gonzales.
“Although this can be a beautiful dream for everyone and no matter how easy it may sound, it takes a lot of effort for a tree to grow from a seed, survive the winter, become robust and evolve without being tempered with.” The statement is also a clear analogy about building a solid economy, either for a nation, an individual or a family.
Again, in this sense, it is possible to see the transformation of new things and the effects of change on nature and the economy. Gonzalez has discovered a new dimension in art by combining those different and irrelevant things together.
However, money, balance and the economy are not Gonzalez’s only areas of focus. His installation “Simulcop” is a video based on a standard design that belonged to an old school book of the same name that was used to teach children how to draw during the years of dictatorship in South America.
The artist’s work in this branch focuses on the animation of these standard drawings as a tale – using images derived from metaphors of the school language that kids used to during that era in Argentina. At the same time, the works feature wall-based compositions of these standard designs but altered in a way so as to portray very politically incorrect situations.
The concept of revolution is a referential point for Gonzalez, sometimes focusing on one of the world’s most famous Argentineans, Che Guevara. In one of his works at Artane, Gonzalez uses a poster of Guevara while displaying different tiny objects on the poster, turning them into something like a wall garment that features small objects houses and trees. For Gonzalez, it is a way of saying that everything is connected with each other.
Gonzalez said his current place of residence, Mexico, influenced his art greatly. “Handicrafts are important in Mexico. Hand-made things are very valuable. As a society, Mexico values handicrafts and there are lots of things that are created only by hand.”
This provides a new challenge for the artist, he said. “You have to create something that is perfect in order to compete and this opens a new way of creative challenge for the artist,” he added.
Gonzalez makes us think about life not in a conventional way, but in a very unconventional one. The artist’s exhibition is consequently full of interesting works that let us think again about the current state of the world.