Stagings/Escenarios
Jorge Tacla
Aug 12–Oct 21
Jorge Tacla (b. 1958, Santiago, Chile) is a celebrated Chilean-born, New York City-based artist who creates ghost-like paintings that blur the boundaries between abstraction and representation to present a damaged view of the world.
His newest paintings continue the artist’s decades-long exploration of the invisible structures and systems at work in society. They feature expressionistic, heavily impastoed surfaces wrought in oil and cold wax in blue, white, gray and sometimes red. The artist’s subjects are similarly pared down, consisting of actual or destroyed architectures. These are distilled from Tacla’s memory, as well as his vast archives of images, which he draws from books, magazines, photo albums and the Internet.
In the late 1980s, Tacla moved from depictions of abject bodies and desert landscapes to a career devoted to painting sublime views of the world's worst nightmares. Among his subjects are the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the World Trade Center disaster and various unending conflicts in the Middle East. Tacla always focuses on the damage done, never on the violence itself.
The ruined apartment blocks featured in the four-panel, twenty-six foot painting Tacla has titled Sign of Abandonment 34/Señal de abandono (2018) represents the destroyed Syrian city of Homs. It is assembled from a composite of images. A depiction of things falling apart—to borrow a line from William Butler Yeats’ famous poem The Second Coming (1919)—Tacla’s powerful canvases confirm the medium's possibilities as the most reflective and enduring vehicle for humanity's most complex stories. Installed on a wooden scaffold at the Reser Center’s art gallery, Sign of Abandonment 34 acquires an outsize monumentality—the better to impress visitors regarding the tragic nature of the images it re-dramatizes in the manner of a public billboard.
In addition to his major painting installation, Tacla will present the HD film Injury Report/ Informe de lesiones (2016-2023). The film alludes directly to the book burning that took place at “el Pedagógico,” Chile’s principal teacher’s college, after that country’s military coup in September of 1973. The film pointedly invokes the German poet Heinrich Heine’s lucid humanist admonition: “Where they burn books, they will also burn people.”