Art and the Human Condition

human condition -noun 1. the positive and negative aspects of existence as a human being, esp. the inevitable events such as birth, childhood, adolescence, love, sex, reproduction, aging, and death.


"In this new proposal, Azofeifa talks about the human condition in times of globalization and over-information, with recognizable but anonymous subjects.

The use of painted playing cards (each one of the squares you see in the paintings is a playing card, see below for a detail or here to see upper left work in development) to create the bigger artworks, the same way the pieces are ordered, show the immediacy and precise situation of our times.

And who better to give testimony that someone immersed in information: an e-marketing and e-commerce consultant for Latin American and Fortune-500 companies, Azofeifa must receive, assimilate, and synthesize information about new technologies and trends, every day of his life.

In his art technique, Azofeifa paints each playing card using spray painting and letter molds, he paints groups of several hundreds at a time, making them cover and blocking areas of the ones below. After that he orders them according to their chromatic weight, like a puzzle. Cards are glued or stapled to the canvas. Each piece takes months to complete.

The figures (both the final ones and the individual pieces) are product of globalization. Each piece (card) has a weight of it's own separately, there's no central point and there's no piece more important than other. But every single one of them loses it's individual importance, and the result is just the sum of the apparent indifference of all of them. This can be seen since Seurat, Pollock or Chuck Close. Although there's a resemblance to Close at a first glance, anyone who knows Close's work will not only see that besides a sense of grid and the use of faces in some of the works, there's no relationship in the reading of the work. In the newest pieces of Azofeifa (web site under construction) the grid disappears completely.

The infinite amount of lectures that a contemporary man can do of this work shows us just how accurate this exposition is."

*Life isn't always easy; I had thought to use two different photos depicting birth: one of a 24 week old premie and the other of a 24 week old aborted fetus. It was too hard for me to crop and create a slideshow with either of the photos, so I looked harded and I found this article. I think it really explains what human condition can look like through the eyes of the art world.*