A Conversation between Luis Molina Pantin and Daniel Quiles

Popular graphic design—on currency, postcards, paperbacks, and other ephemera—has been a consistent presence in your work since the 2000s. You have typically photographed this material in series, but now more than ever you are presenting the original objects themselves.

My interest in photography started early in my life. I began using it to possess whatever I could not have: a car, an airplane, even a particular landscape that I liked. I would photograph them instead, tranquilizing my cravings for ownership. I also had the tendency to anthropomorphize the objects around me. It took me a while to lose the fear or insecurity of showing my works without using photography. I wanted to get the feeling of producing a work that cannot be reproduced. I guess that it is a common practice for many artists. It is very important to have the ability to know which medium is the best one to tell the story.

I have photographed materials, like currency, to take them out of their original contexts and draw attention to printmaking and other details. Then I have presented series like Best-Sellers -National-, 2001-2004, as the actual books plus a photographic version that mobilizes and circulates the work. For the first time in my career, the majority of the works in this exhibition do not involve photography whatsoever.

I wanted to ask about the references to reading in some of your titles, which raise the larger question of what it means to “read” a series of photographs or an installation of found objects.

I have always loved this directive by Laurence Weiner: “Learn to read art.”

Legibility is present in my work as a validating force, both in the photographs and the book installations. My titles are as important as the pieces; they work together in collaboration. Sometimes the titles come before the works, and other times the works precede the title.

I try to be non-didactic. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”—One the prime functions of contemporary art is to leave the viewer imaginative space. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why early on, I abandoned Cartier-Bresson-style street photography, his “decisive moment.” Where the anecdotic takes over the work, it becomes like a commercial billboard. There is no space to think or to appreciate that the image is more important than the concept, as Susan Sontag argues in On Photography. 

Can you talk about your new photobook (Orange Monochrome, 2016) that you are going to present at the gallery?

Between 1969 and 1971, the publishing house Salvat España edited the Biblioteca Básica Salvat. The collection consisted of 100 classic titles from world literature. The publications followed the same graphic design, small format, with an illustration in the inner cover of a Roman column. On the front page, there was always a recognizable orange square. These books had a massive circulation; Salvat managed to print an average of a million copies per title. They were distributed widely in kiosks in all Spanish-speaking countries at very low prices. In a sense, Salvat recycled and democratized all these classic stories.

I purchased these books in second-hand bookstores and on the Internet, and photographed forty covers. I tried to portray the books as witnesses of time. I selected the covers that had the most wear, a sense of ownership: plastic wrapping, traces of moisture or moths, signatures, stains, or doodles.

For the installation Orange Monochrome (2014-2015), I created a body of work in serialized form: a design that repeats but whose content is constantly changing on every page. Change is generated through different titles, authors and conditions, so that flipping through the book, the viewer is presented with forty journeys unified by a generic design. The orange square recalls a canonical form of modern painting, yet I pointedly subvert its values of uniqueness and cultural elitism through popular, mass-produced, low-cost multiples. 

You find “kinetic” effects in unexpected, even absurd, locations or arrangements of objects, a reclamation of Venezuelan modernism that feels alternatingly lighthearted and sincere.

There are always competing elements of humor, irony, honesty and romanticism in my work. The Kinetic Art movement of the 1950s established Venezuelan art internationally for the first time. Artists like Jesús Rafael Soto, Carlos Cruz-Diez and Alejandro Otero left an enormous influence that still persists today in Venezuela. Many artists, both culturally and commercially, try to follow their lead in satisfying the demands of the market.

In Chelsea Galleries (2001-2006), I wanted to show the way that these galleries express their kinetics through these black binders used to classify their artists. Sometimes when I visit these spaces I get more inspiration by the architecture or design of the galleries than the art that is actually on display. Similarly, in Kinetic Reading (2014), I relate the patterns of the prison bars of these popular book covers with “our” geometric movement. I have always been influenced by the saying “Never judge a book by its cover.”

My goal is ultimately to formally search for a lost harmony or “modernism” that these items or places are not supposed to have. I locate color bars in re-used objects or the everyday cityscape, use “brick” cell phones to create a grey scale, or set up a rainbow of monochromes with revolutionary book covers. In some ways, the only thing that remains valid in these forgotten objects is this “modernism effect.”

You currently live and work between Caracas, New York and London, Ontario. How have recent developments in Venezuela affected your work, and how do you negotiate them for international audiences?

Since Chávez came to power, many Venezuelan artists have fled the country—a classic diaspora. I stayed for seventeen years because of family, as well as for creative and economic reasons. Geographically, Caracas is very central, and it is also much cheaper than many other cities. Nowadays it is not like before, when you needed to live in an art center to gain recognition as an artist, like Berlin in the 1910s, Paris in the 1920s, or New York in the 1960s or 1970s. There is respect for artists working from the periphery and its new art cities, like Bogotá, Detroit, Shanghai, and Mexico City.

For me, working in Venezuela is just more interesting. Sometimes I need that informality and chaos in order to create. I might not be as creative living in Oslo, where the rhythm of life is different. Yet there are always challenges. In the last couple of years, the situation in Venezuela has become much worse. I had an opportunity to live in Canada and I took it. I still maintain my studio and apartment in Caracas, and my gallery in New York, where I lived twice and still visit frequently.

Some of my recent works have been related to the current situation in Venezuela in an indirect way, but I don’t use it as a “flag.” I am not monothematic, and I try not to repeat myself. Many Latin American artists use these issues as their main language. I think there are limits to this formula; activism and art making do not always go together. If you want to change the world, it is better to be an actor, or social worker, or famous musician—to reach broader audiences.

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Luis Molina-Pantin (Venezuelan, b. 1969, Geneva, Switzerland) lives and works between Caracas, New York and London, Ontario. In 1994 he obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a Film and Photography Major at Concordia University in Montreal and later a Master of Fine Arts (New Genres) at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1997. Molina-Pantin has exhibited extensively both domestically and abroad, individually he has shown at Henrique Faria (New York), Federico Luger Gallery (Milan), Galería Marta Cervera (Madrid) and in Caracas at: Museo Alejandro Otero, Sala Mendoza, Faria-Fabregas Galería and Periférico Caracas|Arte Contemporáneo. His work has also been featured in group exhibitions worldwide, including at the International Center of Photography, Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and America’s Society in New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Itau Cultural, Sao Paulo; Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City; NGBK, Berlin; Heidelberger Kunstverein, Heidelberg; Palau de la Virreina, Barcelona and biennials like Gwangju, Sao Paulo and Havana. Amongst the collections that have acquired his work are Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Phoenix Art Museum; Diana/Bruce Halle Collection, Arizona; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville; Galería de Arte Nacional, Caracas; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas and Fundación Banco Mercantil, Caracas. His work has been published in many books and periodicals. Among them: The New York Times, The New Yorker, Liberation (Paris), Art Forum, Art in America, and Brooklyn’s Bomb and Cabinet, along with Coco Fusco’s The bodies that were not ours and Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres III.