Hans Theys is a twentieth-century philosopher and art historian. He has written and designed dozens of books on the works of contemporary artists and published hundreds of essays, interviews and reviews in books, catalogues and magazines. All his publications are based on actual collaborations and conversations with artists.

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ESSAYS, INTERVIEWS & REVIEWS

Emilio López-Menchero - 2015 - The Painter as Eternal Youth [EN, essay]
Text , 4 p.




__________

Hans Theys


The Painter as Eternal Youth
On the work of Emilio López-Menchero



Emilio López-Menchero (°1960) is a kind-hearted, passionate man. As an inspired ambassador for himself, he immerses you in his world, which is like a maelstrom around a quest for a tangible or visible identity. Usually the artist’s point of departure is anchored both in architecture and the visual arts. His work is multiform: he creates spatial interventions and stages performances, makes photographs of himself dressed up like a celebrity, he paints and he draws.
López-Menchero’s training as an architect has influenced his entire oeuvre, but this influence only started after his teacher Jean Glibert convinced him that “with painting it is possible to cross the frame and intervene in the urban fabric” (Hans Theys, Focus, Snoeck, 2012, p. 157). Central in López-Menchero’s work is the handbook Bauentwurfslehre by architect Ernst Neufert, which is based on the idea of a ‘standard human’, on which all dimensions and measures for furniture and houses can be based. This ‘standard human’ pops up in López-Menchero’s work in various forms, such as the faceless M. le Géant, the artist made for the town of Ath. “I wanted to march with the parade,” López-Menchero relates, “but I was told I couldn’t because my giant ‘lacked a history’ – and because it was a Spanish giant.” “So, my giant has a history after all!” I replied. “But I couldn’t participate anyway.”
Emilio López-Menchero was born in Mol (Belgium) to highly educated Spanish parents. When they moved to Vienna, he continued to study at the Lycée français. Today, the artist speaks five languages, “but all rather poorly,” he says, laughing. The theme of identity, which is central in his oeuvre, is not based on an intellectual pose – it is a reality he lives every day.


Cabezudo (2014) and Pasionaria (2006)

Recently López-Menchero was invited to participate in an artistic project with residents of four institutes caring for people who think differently. Recalling the giant he made for Ath, he proposed to make giant heads. This idea was inspired by the Spanish tradition of the ‘cabezudos’, the giant heads that in some regions are part of the local tradition. Currently the heads are finished and a parade has been organized. Making the heads was quite an adventure. First López-Menchero attempted to create a more open and free situation for the participants. He worked for example in a tent in the garden instead of in the usual windowless spaces. There were also a lot of people who met for the first time, because normally their lives are divided by different time­tables. Trucks delivered bricks and one and a half ton of clay. The bricks were piled up and covered with clay, which was then sculpted into masks. On these masks strips of paper were glued. After drying, the paper shapes were removed and a supporting structure was attached to them, which rests on the shoulders.
One woman made quite a convincing self-portrait; from another woman’s mask strange shapes protruded from the ears; a devil’s head emerged from the forehead of a third mask. About twenty masks were produced. “It’s double,” Christine Tossens explains. “The masks seem to blow up differences between the various participants, but because the masks hide them, all participants also become anonymous and identical.” López-Menchero adds, “As you can’t see them, they can be anyone. The most wonderful thing about the parade we’ve had, is the realization that also these people could become the focus of everyone’s attention. That was a wonderful feeling.”
I refer to this adventure, because it introduces us to all ingredients of López-Menchero’s work: the theme of identity (which is entangled with the shape of the mask that both conceals and reveals); the theme of public space (the collaboration with people who think differently in a tent and organizing a parade); the importance of architecture (the scale of the masks); the plastic element (sculpting and painting the masks); finally, there is the social ­element (collaboration with people who think differently, which are brought in contact with unknown people in a public space).
The reader can see in this book how since 1990 López-Menchero has created installations in which these elements are recurrent. His dual training as an architect and visual artist is the key to an effective response to the world. When at the Brussels-South railway station he places a huge metal megaphone to commemorate the political manifestations that used to start there, he does so on a scale that competes with the monumentality of the trains that thunder past. The link between both is associative (trains have loud horns for hooting), but also efficient. The fault line in the Brussels urban fabric that resulted from constructing the North-South connection becomes a symbol of social and political fault lines. Via a concrete staircase the public can access the mouthpiece of the megaphone: there is also room for him or her. The individual being has a place in the whole, which previously threatened to crush him or her.


Connections

Time and again there is a confrontation between a small and a large scale. That is the case when the artist uses tram and train rails, for example to create a fictitious tram stop in Poland, or to project an image in a Berlin railway tunnel, or when he tries to move a rail on wheels through the centre of Brussels. But it is also the case when he links his relatively small stature (1.68 metres) to his father who used to play basketball, or to Neufert’s standard human, or to the ideal size of a male model (1.86 metres). This theme also surfaces in the transport and exhibition of buzzing tsetse flies, in making us listen to the whistle of merchants or a Tarzan yell that is heard throughout the city, in making visible the number of ‘standing places’ in the load compartment of a truck, or in blowing up French fries (magnified a hundred times), shoe soles (twenty times) or a playpen (three times, because at the time his son was three times smaller than he was).
Striking in López-Menchero’s oeuvre with regard to the themes are the countless connections that link the different interventions and works of art. Time and again the same themes surface. A ­comment on the choking of Semira Adamu (1978–1998) turns into a monumental cloud that is made of pillows; at the same time, it is a soundscape (we hear a faint ‘welcome’ in several languages from the film Cabaret). All soundscapes cross-refer to each other. Scale shifts refer to architecture and the place of people in the world. In the world of art, the social meets the political. Chance and anecdote (for example the height of father and son) acquire a place of their own, separate from theory (Neufert and Glibert).
The wonderful thing is: this is precisely how López-Menchero thinks. When he speaks about himself or his work, the artist invariably has great trouble to explain all of these different levels in concrete terms. For example, he has to explain a bit of the theory of architecture, recount a childhood memory about a running cabezudo, refer to three other works by himself and relate the whole to a remark made by a fellow artist. López-Menchero’s work derives its power from his being aware of all these connections and from the simultaneity of all these different levels. In that sense he is the creator of an oeuvre that is both literary and pictorial. It reminds us of how writers and painters can lend meaning to the world by describing the small, while at the same situating the small by creating large frameworks. It reminds us of the multiple layers and complex links in Marcel Broodthaers’s oeuvre.


Painting

The more I look at López-Menchero’s oeuvre, the more I am convinced that in first instance he is a draughtsman and a painter who forced himself to take detours because he was himself disappointed in his early paintings. That view does not conflict with my appreciation for the complexity and the multi-layered character of his work. A kind of ‘soul’ pervades his entire oeuvre. Could it be possible to point to this soul without reducing the artist’s work to it?
When in 2003 he showed his first drawings in the Fondation pour l’architecture in Brussels, it was the artist Ann Veronica Janssens who told me about them – and she added that they were sublime. There they were, in all their splendour: spot-on and sensuous, departing from and resulting in images that are linked to all the artist’s themes. But when today we look at some blow-ups of the drawings executed in paint (such as the kneeling man with his two shopping bags), or ­simply at most of the paintings, we have to conclude that this man has always been a painter –it is just that first he had to live and work before he could allow himself to make paintings. Curiously enough, probably his photographs led to this breakthrough.
In a documentary that was recently screened in Brussels, López-Menchero poses for a photographic portrait/self-portrait of a drug baron, who himself poses as a Mexican freebooter. In this documentary we notice time and again how the artist’s face hardens as he turns his eyes inwards or makes them look dead. I am not quite sure how I should describe his transformation, but it is certainly impressive. This man paints with his face by creating textures that evoke other images in the mind of the public. The same power we encounter in his paintings of eyes, which represent both his own eyes and those of the characters depicted. And it works! We see two images at the same time.
Even more impressive is the spectacle when we are talking to López-Menchero. Like a three-­dimensional, moveable projection screen his face is incessantly conjuring up new images. It changes shape. Suddenly it becomes very feminine and first a three-quarter profile of Rrose Sélavy appears, then Frida Kahlo, Balzac or Picasso. López-Menchero’s face is masculine and feminine at once. It is fluid, it is polymorphous, it is constantly calling forth emotions, it dissolves and then condenses again. His face is like a living painting.
Having reflected for twenty-five years on identity and appearance, it is as if López-Menchero has managed to realize a dream: he is everybody at once. Or, to put it in other words, his ­vulnerable appearance has become intangible. We no longer know how big he is or what he looks like. By showing us so many facets of his self, he makes it physically impossible for us to see who he might be. We have become painters ourselves, aware of the inconstancy of reality, of the colourless bristling of atoms that hides behind faces (which we are already familiar with from Giacometti’s works), and of the strange, projective powers of our brain.
It is precisely therefore that López-Menchero is in first instance a painter, but a painter like Flaubert or Bosch, who conjured up in the grooves of a nutshell the world and our brain. Or like Dorian Gray, who stayed young and beautiful all his life, because in his place a painted portrait grew old and bore the signs of his evil character. In the same way, López-Menchero transforms the heaviness of our conscious existence into countless interventions, while he himself becomes ever younger, nimbler and lighter.


Montagne de Miel, March 3rd 2015