Gabriel Valansi
Buenos Aires, Argentina – 1959
Gabriel Valansi's work seems to be cut out by a peephole; it immediately connects us with a security device: the eye that spies. It exhibits the horror and self-destruction of the human being, the underhanded war of contemporaneity. Valansi is a visual artist, photographer, musician, and a scholar of the cabala. Interested in human doing, he began his path in a technical school, which led him to study engineering and physics, but his dream, ultimately, has always been to be a writer.
His grandfather was a Russian music lover, who also collected communist magazines called Novedades de la Unión Soviética. At home, Gabriel spent his time listening to music, looking at vinyl record covers or reading magazines, childhood curiosities that would later become part of his imagery. Much of what he saw and heard in that house became his artistic practice and his way of narrating with images.
His works critically show the relationship between humans and technologies. A whole series of his photographs were taken with a military night vision device during the 2001 looting in Argentina, suggesting somehow that there is no other possible lens to record this world in flames. His work explores the contradictions of an increasingly connected reality and interrogates the psychological representations and deep-seated fears that modern societies provoke, exposing them to the excesses of their own security policies and voyeurism.
Valansi builds towers of technological waste, shows the nuclear tests that took place during the Cold War or exhibits photographs taken with war devices. However, he questions whether art can be political, in the sense of militancy or as a way to change society, although he does not resign himself to the idea that art is only a market. After many years in the world art scene and through different media, the Argentine artist sends us a clear message: reality can also be fiction and there is a key in how the point of view is constructed.