I’m deeply impressed by what appears to be Guzmán’s critical knock for bringing both of these strategies together to, let’s say, reboot them inrelation to current debates about identity and difference, as well as the useor alleged misuse of (source) imagery. New-Colombian Neo-concrete Abstraction in the Era of Global Post-conceptualism. In honor of the dolphin of the Amazonas, for example creates a kind of feedback loop that is set in perpetual motion from the formal to the social and back again ad infinitum. And its companion, And Child, rubs up against it with cunning (or cutting) cuteness. The depicted seriousness of the triple threat of Guzmán’s photoshoot series Tiempos Díficiles (Hard Times)-seductive and contemplative displays of display (a hanging vinyl banner, and an unframed and framed photograph of different sizes), and a part of what he has considered as a Political Activist art campaign that could be aestheticized, if not romanticized -is contra-posed with other works like Troll (aesthetic power) and Wallpaper Pattern #9 that open up the body of Guzmán’s work to the complicated and stable legacies of the found objects and collage of high modernism (note John Tagg’s claims above). And if by the time you are reading this Guzmán has gone ahead and called a digi- tal print on canvas of a painting of a horse Portrait of a Young Man, we will be faced with fourth threat to the mask of difference that actually reinforces the exponential capacity of his total- ly killer enterprise. I sincerely hope he did it.
Terry R. Myers