Doors

2020

Drawings

"There will never be a door. you're in»

Jorge Luis Borges

Text by Anamely Ramos

A door is what it is: a vein, a blink of an eye or something else, a limit, a possibility or at least a permission. Like many objects, doors are absorbed in their functionality. And yet they are an unusual object, since they often escape the normality of collectible objects, although it is also their own liminal nature that makes them targets of interpretations, reinventions and associations. They have always been taken into account, either from their importance in everyday life, ritual practices that prioritize their intermediate location, the symbolic reconstruction that occurs in language and a long etcetera.

The doors condense within themselves all the tensions between inside and outside, protection and intimacy, confinement and exit. They are fertile in themselves, like trees, or the giant African snail. They are self-sufficient and, at the same time, I cannot imagine anything that depends more on the network of relationships in which it is inserted, on the dimensions that it manages and gives way to.

When Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara began to draw doors, an endless number of obvious allusions and some perversions rained down. It happens all the time with everything that he creates. What I thought of, as soon as I saw them, was the African doors that I have been discovering over the years, with their nuances depending on the region, but all with the same strength, beauty and narrative capacity. In these cultures, the doors are a synthesis of the energies that are spread over the world, of their impact on the economic or social materiality of specific environments and even of an object sublimation of the human body. The action of the supernatural and the body as the immediate reality that receives and filters it.

For Luis Manuel, his doors are connected in an almost unconscious way with a primitive experience he intuited. Although perhaps unconscious is not the right word, perhaps spontaneous or tacit are better ones. In any case, it is not a strictly rational question. As in almost all his works, an initial experience and a taste for a particular type of game is key, in which the forms or gestures imagined by him seek to awaken an avalanche of learned meanings and others that are barely catched by us or that catch us.

Luis Manuel is a constant agitator, both on the outside: prodding and attracting attention, and on the inside: feverishly stirring his own references and the references of the people he knows, and even those same people, if they let him. These asymmetrical, whimsical, and even predictably anthropomorphic doors connect him to a practice of sculpture that he cultivated from a very young age, which he makes in situ, almost blindly, like someone who dives into the past of art, but also into his own past. These drawings are like a prequel to those unrealized sculptures and, at the same time, they are a provisional conclusion to all the sculptures he has ever made, his performances and even his political activism.