Resero va [Cometh the drover]

May - June 2016
Centro Cultural Recoleta

Alexis Minkiewicz’s work smacks of group art and, while some of us in his inner circle are aware that it has been explored in solitude, the spectator is witness to a collective act. Resero Va is a work that looms monstrously from amidst blood-red bones and forgotten, indivisible human tools smeared with the fat of the communitarian; a terrifying additive in this construction, which feels raw, unfinished, disturbing… Have the dinosaurs been reconstructed yet again out of the worst of what we have to offer as the dominant – and dominated – species? Like all sweeping tragedy, this Jorodowskian monstrosity not only calls for many participants, but for a chain of irresistible errors. Of all humankind’s sins the social lack of awareness of death that surrounds us – and spatters us – is the most barefaced. It can be sensed in its component slices of raw ham and jerky, and in the hooves enmired in an impossible eternal kiss, the iron cross cubed ad infinitum, the two chastity belts joined at the hip, the axel grease and the beeswax, which, as cows are co-opted to feed and clothe us, form part of an inventory of paradoxes peculiar to the subordinate worker (and zoological) castes: the base of the hierarchical pyramid, whose hands – and lives and deaths – have built the concrete hell we live in today.

Juan Tauil