There’s a Playboy girl riding the streets of Los Angeles in a white limo. The curious thing is that we cross paths with her several times. She has long, bleach, sparkly hair. My father waves at her while we listen to Edith Piaf in the car. He says, “I used to listen to this on the radio when I was your age.” She never looks at us. At night, the city is a beautiful void. We see her on Wilshire Avenue heading towards the sea. Exiting the parking lot of one of those 24-hour supermarkets. Also zigzagging up the hill leading to the Hollywood sign. We begin to imagine that only we can see her, and to speculate about her precedence. We fancy ourselves a duo of detectives in a TV show. What’s irrefutable is that she is mythical and eternal. Sometimes with distance one forgets about things. That was the only trip my father and I took together; he was in his seventies, and I was twenty-two. When he returned to Buenos Aires, he began painting nude women to pass the insomnia. Fiorela, Gina, Nicole, Miriam, Midori, Malbec, Heidi, Adriana, Whitney, Solange. There are more, and they are everywhere. I like to think of them as his extraterrestrial guardians. Something about them reminds me of a feeling from childhood, the blurry line between reality and fantasy, the uninhibited and the innocent, that new age euphoria so nineteen-eighties
Powers in Struggle in Si la muerte fuera una estrella porno by Geraldine Barón
By Mariana Rodríguez Iglesias
Lo irrefutable es que ella es mítica y eterna
Geraldine Barón
Te encontraré una mañana
dentro de mi habitación
y prepararás la cama
para dos.
Charly García
The first thing I think about when I see this series of photographs by Geraldine Barón is that there is a brief but intense wrestling of powers. I think of the layers of meaning that overlap. There are paintings, but they are photos: photos of paintings. In the authorial plane, there is also a deliberate power game. The photographs were taken by her, while the paintings are works by her father. However, neither of them appear in them. The only protagonists are the women painted. There’s another protagonist: Death, who, like them, flirts with being a porn star, and, in a diva's whim, manages to conquer the poster of this exhibition. She inhabits the title, surprised that she’s been named.
In Losing you —her immediately preceding, perhaps a prequel to this one —Russell Harbaugh writes that Geraldine had managed to curate the personal and painful experience of inhabiting the proximity of losing a loved one. In Si la muerte fuera una estrella porno, this curatorship is, once again, a game of mirrors placed in an abyss. A distraction maneuver. In the first discursive plane, we have the editing of her photos that make up the exhibit, and in the second, the selection and arrangement of the paintings.
How does this wrestling for power continue when the opponents are not clearly defined? What kind of fight is this where the forces are so unevenly distributed? How can one continue until the end if from the very beginning it’s clear that the main rival is unbeatable?
Si la muerte fuera una estrella porno can be read as a sequel to Losing you. Both series are testimonies of the resources used to suspend the certainty of death. Where we once saw a narration of the passage of time as waiting, encoded in everything a family tries to do to evade pain, now it is the vivid, clear, creative resource of elaborating one’s own goodbye. Although perhaps a form of goodbye is not how we should view these paintings either. Because this same person, who knew how to entertain her daughter with stories of femme fatales in white limos, learned to ask for a breath from insomnia through painting. Late, but sure, he dedicates himself to creating ideal women, straight out of those very stories that once had Wilshire Avenue as their backdrop. Now I understand. It’s not a goodbye, it’s a folding in time.
In Losing you, Geraldine photographed people because she was interested in showing us the universe around her. She told us about her family and some of the habits of affection. She, the invisible protagonist, appeared as the demiurge of that story, controlling what we saw and didn’t see, stipulating a careful sequence that borrowed much from cinema. In Si la muerte fuera una estrella porno, it’s harder to continue seeing her as the protagonist behind the camera. There are so many mediations, so many layers, that having her as a reference becomes somewhat unnecessary. There are also no people, except for the represented women. Everything speaks of absence, because that "Everything" is presence as an index. The paintings indicate a hand that painted, a desire that was fulfilled, a libido that found the moment (late in a life full of activities) to start painting. The house, with its objects, its dated style, with family photos, the kitchen stuff—Everything—speaks to us of presence off-screen. The thing is, when someone leaves forever, there are two planes of vestiges: the immaterial plane of memories and the material plane of objects. Here, memories, anxious and premature, coexist with objects, traces of a life, loaded with meaning. And what place do these women occupy? Do they perhaps inhabit a kind of emotional-temporal limbo? Another struggle of powers. Just as an idea can obsessively invade every corner of our thoughts, these paintings occupy unusual spaces in the house. Some count sheep to fall asleep, others invent porn stars.
In this society we live in, masculinity seeks to be perennial and constant; that is its arrogance of existence. The contrast to this vision is femininity as corruptible, as vulnerable. Masculinity speaks to us of permanence, while femininity expresses processes. In Si la muerte fuera una estrella porno, there is an inversion of these terms. They are the Dorian Grays of the story. They, as desirable women, will never age. Only the painting, as an object, as a thing, can age. He, the creator of these immortal beauties, will pass, like all of us, abandoning his vitality. In this inversion of terms, the painter of women attempts one last masculine gesture. It is his last opportunity for power: they, like death, are his only possession. The photographs, which fulfill the ritual of immortalizing this scenario of evasions, are, at the same time, a vulnerable record and a powerful gesture with which Geraldine tries to have the last word.
Mariana Rodríguez Iglesias
December 2013