Maisterravalbuena is pleased to present the gallery’s third exhibition of the Peruvian artist Daniel Jacoby.
“Camouflage for a very specific place” is an exhibition exclusively dedicated to drawing, and the artist’s first
exhibition based on this technique.
The exhibition stems from the need to draw without any purpose beyond the reflection on the act of making. The
drawing is planned and developed at the moment of its creation, when an immediate connection between the
hand and the head takes place. The image forms as these two body parts interact and, therefore, the imperfect
print of that learning process is captured on the paper. This exhibition might be understood as a kaleidoscope of
latent images in the artist’s mind, and a retrospective on previous works, like a compilation of learning processes
hidden under the surface of a sculpture or the plot of a movie, which is one of the artist’s common tools.
The title of the exhibition “Camouflage for a very specific place”, which also entitles one group of drawings, may seem
not to be in connection with the images shown, evidencing the formal indetermination of the drawings, but it is
indeed a title that describes what we are seeing, giving rise to a paradoxical game between the use of the title’s
categorical language and the apparent abstraction of the drawings. The idea of “camouflage” decodes for us the
mess of lines composing the drawings and turns them into a formal metaphor of how reality disguises before us
and how we camouflage before it. The camouflages multiply throughout the exhibition, where each drawing
mirror the others, as observed in the reflective relationship between the drawing made on the wall- called “You
wake up full of energy after that”- and “Camouflage for a not-so-specific place IX”; or in the six-drawing group “Camouflage
for a very specific place”, hanging from the same wall.
In line with the title, the drawings take us to very specific places -or not so specific-. They are spaces resulting
from a systematic and unornamented movement of the hand as it traces lines, little by little composing the
context. That superposition of plots take us to places that may bear very specific names, but may not be so
specific when representing them: jungles, oceans, utopian cities seen from a bird’s eye, mechanical systems,
crossing-outs, virtual models, electronic circuits, etc…
This presentation of drawings as a large system of references, which all the drawings exhibited reflect, works also
as visual files that recall old projects, such as the “Sidney” sculptures, started in 2014 and still in progress, or the
2016 “Jagata” video, that was shot in Japan and shows images of the complexity of the Tokyo train system.
In addition to the two groups of drawings mentioned above, “I already know them all”-above the wall drawings- is
the most narrative piece and the one that best explains the exhibition. It is a group of six black-ink drawings that
were composed as a series of moments in clear correspondence with the fragmented structure of videos, such as
“Ahold of Get The Things To”, 2014, or “Mountain Plain Mountain”, 2018, where one single situation is seen from the
different characters’ views, giving rise to multiple forms of certainty. These drawings are presented as six possible
ways to compose one of them, a display of the different possibilities when it comes to building and dissecting an
image. It is just another way to reveal the process of learning.
