THE MIRROR AND THE MARRIAGE

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Whenever works incorporate images taken from the media, people tend to say that the work is Pop. Such a statement has recently lost its meaning if we consider that mass culture is already 60 or 70 years old, and that everyone here was born at least in the era of radio and print newspapers. In this way, almost every image we know either already comes from the media or will soon be absorbed by it, and therefore becomes part of so-called mass culture. That being the case, the focus of interest shifts to the choice of images and to the discursive strategies the artist proposes.

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In the works Gustavo von Ha presents at this moment, two themes stand out: the mirror and marriage.

The mirror appears in the process Von Ha used to execute these works; they are what he calls the “magic mirror,” a name referring to a drawing toy—a semi-mirrored acrylic plate that reflects, on one side, the original image placed on the same side. The drawing is made as if it were laid over the original, but reversed, mirrored. In his book Secret Knowledge, David Hockney demonstrated extensively how many artists since 1400 used optical processes as drawing tools. The mirror, as a narcissistic and duplicating element, has appeared in painting ever since, but perhaps the most mirror-constructed painting was Las Meninas (1656) by Diego Velázquez.

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It is no coincidence that Lacan associates painting with a game of mirrors and contemplation[1], in which the main subject manifests itself through a relationship of openings and fissures that culminates in the hidden genital organ of the Infanta Margarita—then five years old—at the center of the canvas, as a predestined image reflected in the mirror at the back, where one sees the girl’s future image, the queen, with her medusan gaze[2].

The second theme that appears in his work is marriage. It is interesting to note the great variety of pairings that Gustavo managed to construct: woman with a two-headed monster, Batman and Robin, the seven dwarfs, princess and prince, men alone, women alone, and Shrek alone. Even those who are alone in the drawings seem to be searching for someone. In a certain sense, these grooms in search of a bride recall the love machine that Duchamp proposed in his Large Glass (1923), as he said, “the bride is basically a motor,” and what drives her is the “gasoline of love (a secretion of her sexual glands)”[3].

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It may seem like a natural choice, but if the selection were made by someone else, other images might appear—cars, motorcycles, sports, animals, plants, landscapes, insects, machines, fish, flags, signs, patterns, and much more.

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Marriage as a motor, the search for the other—even if in the mirror—the fear of isolation: these seem to be the analogies Gustavo is placing in his work, far more complex than a simplifying analysis might suggest. The search for the other says a great deal about the one who searches: “I am a little of what I seek,” like the pair that forms in the mirror, real and virtual.

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Sergio Romagnolo
November 2008