AITOR LAJARIN

work in progress....studio pics, FEB 2012.

2012-01-20T07:53:00.004-08:00

La orilla (the shore) Trayecto Galeria, Spain, Nov 2011.

2011-11-24T09:32:00.000-08:00

http://www.trayectogaleria.com/?cod=47&idioma=en#


The Shore 

The shore, a metaphor that Aitor Lajarín  borrows from Paul Valéry as the title of his exhibition at Trayecto, is a  term widely used to refer to the changing outline that the tireless sea  draws on the Earth. The mutability encompassed in the word has proved  highly fertile for modern poetry and mathematics alike due to the  concepts of the limit and infinity contained within it. The shore is a  line that separates the known from the unknown, what is inside from what  is outside. In Valéry, however, it is activated by the action of that  which is coming, by what the unknown brings to us, a kind of objet  trouvé for he who waits: an object open to the awareness that it unfolds  in and for the very act of approaching. 
To pursue this  reflection further, it could be said that Lajarín advances a concept of  his work open to non-transcendent self-referentiality. In his notes on  the project he lays out the case for cause and effect existing  simultaneously and even for the effect existing before the cause, as a  result of which he writes: “[…] I have attempted to identify essential  questions that are, and have been, important in my work by making them  materialise as a structural part of the project […] identifying these  cadences and enhancing them […] making the work itself, its process and  the system of reflexive relationships it proposes the emerging meaning  itself […]”. 
The reductive aesthetic of Lajarín’s work is to an  extent in keeping with Zizek, who points to the fundamentally  ‘reductionist’ function of consciousness in Organs without a Body, in  which he writes that consciousness is the reductive mechanism whereby  complexity is simplified to an extreme degree, that consciousness is the  medium of ‘abstraction’ par excellence, and that it reduces its objects  to a pair of simple characteristics. 

POSTCITY Artium museum, Vitoria, Spain, Oct 2010-Jan2011

2011-11-24T08:23:00.000-08:00

http://www.artium.org/English/Exhibitions/Past/tabid/335/language/en-US/Default.aspx

The project that Aitor Lajarín has created especially for ARTIUM looks at metropolises and the concept of the contemporary city. It is a timely work since it comes at a moment when human life seems to be irrevocably organised around the urban environment.
Lajarín analyses the life and space of cities by looking at key aspects related to the processes of urban development and restructuring that have taken place on a global scale in recent decades. These processes are all interrelated and closely connected with the cultural, social and economic transformations that have occurred, and have taken shape in concepts such as neoliberalism, globalisation, postmodernity and the information society.
The artist takes as his starting point Los Angeles, where he has spent much of the last two years, and extends his analysis to other places in the manner of a collage using other cities. Based on the ideas of urban theorists such as Mike Davis and Edward Soja, who believe that L.A. is a prime example, containing as it does a vast amalgam of the characteristics attributed to these new urban spaces, Lajarín has created a fictional city, PostCity, which could be identified with Los Angeles but also with the standard model of what a city is.
The exhibition is structured around an animated film that deals with issues such as the spatial, economic and social restructuring of cities and, as a follow-on, policies of control, forms of simulation and hyper-reality, as well as movements reacting to these active forces. The film is accompanied by a series of elements used in making it, together with a collection of objects produced in order to emphasise certain ideas and to complete the panorama surrounding these questions.
One of the main traits of this concept of the city is formal complexity, since it combines simultaneous processes of abandonment and reoccupation of the territory, in other words, the dismantling of pre-existing urban realities and the recolonisation of the city with other new ones. In processes of abandonment, there is a weakening of the idea of place, of territorially defined social communities; in processes of reoccupation, a new spatial character develops in which the urban is inseparable from the non-urban, the boundaries between interior and exterior are blurred, and concepts such as ‘city’, ‘suburb’, ‘countryside’ and ‘metropolitan area’ are difficult to define.
The intention is that the spectator will complete this image, projecting onto it his own experience of the urban space, that he will compare and contrast his own ideas with it and so arrive at a more complex vision of the phenomenon, as well as a greater awareness of the urban environment around him. The project is an attempt, in short, to trigger critical thinking of the space by means of a fiction created using some of the media made available by art.