Sentimientos económicos

Marek's work is always a double wager. On one hand, a self-reflexive game with the history of contemporary art; and on the other, a critical questioning of the economic status of the aesthetic—encompassing art as commodity, the economic flows of globalization, and the conditions of possibility for the creation of value as a principle of governance. These have spanned Pacific trade routes, the endemic vocabularies of objects, baroque materialities and their monetary translations. But this time it's not a historical investigation of exchanges, but rather a factical phenomenology of what happens to the body with the beliefs that suture life, founded around economic phenomena. Nearly all the relationships we conduct day to day are mediated by the exchange of commodities; one only approaches people through the products they sell or produced, which you exchange, in turn, for your products now turned into money: the general equivalent—and those exchanges constitute what we call reality. To obtain value it's necessary to incite consumers' desire—desire historically promoted through status and beauty, use and pleasure. Art objects have historically proven principles for their dignified exhibition: a certain distance between objects for contemplation, pedestals and white walls that allow appreciation of the immaterial purity of art's aura. But this exhibition is mounted on Pantone 448 C: the world's ugliest color. The gesture seems to ask: Can desire be produced within a space with a color that repels you? The exhibition Sentimientos económicos makes tangible some of the ways in which the flow of value and the circulation of money express themselves in everyday imaginaries and reveal the forces that govern the world, the fictions that sustain the real: the market and aesthetics. Wolfryd's artistic gestures deactivate or break the functionality—or primary use—of proven commercial methods: he juxtaposes critical theory with ephemeral materiality, computer systems with human principles of luminous attraction, attractive and impossible images with oil glazing, business mysticism with the hope of eternal rest, traditional Japanese welcome with Chinese industrialization of the cute, the intimate promise of fortune with the irony of supposed global financial stability. In his practice, Marek unravels the tricks assembled by the market, the factual power of surfaces, and consumers' idealizations. In six pieces, Marek Wolfryd—and one speculative currency in collaboration with Alberto Vivar—explores representations of the natural form of value, of its shell onto which desires are deposited through their physical and semiotic translations. When you see ads from Temu, Alibaba, AliExpress, Shopify and other global-scale retailers in your feed, one thinks of access and globalization: of immediacy. Although what you see doesn't exist, desire connects it with presence. What Wolfryd does is create works that recreate algorithm-mediated consumption experiences reified for eternity. Globalization happens in statistics and numbers; the rest is damage control. Money is the universal material idea of the modern world. Regardless of era, religion, language or territory, monetary circulation allows us to believe in the unity of the world and that the digital and real flow of wealth in its translation of objects and figures provides stability and the idea of future. As in every operative fiction, fortune has its customs and rituals, its beliefs and amulets. Every metaphysical system creates a connection with the mundane through certain objects, with certain materials and practices that operate as vortexes. We already know that wealth is not a product of labor power, but of a field beyond rigorous materialism. Access to good fortune is closer to mysticism than to will and honest work; it can come through archaic paths like finding a three-peso coin, cleansing the energies at your business entrance with a Maneki-neko, the color of the wall, or a fortune cookie. M. S. Yániz