Ronald Moran's Work
Ronald Moran’s work (1972, San Salvador) the different strategies of dimerization of objects or of the work of art itself become an immediately recognizable language, yet one that is never static or confined to its own style. In works which are already paradigmatic, he addressed domestic violence through installations in which the furniture and objects were covered with polyester foam, a material replacing cotton so soft, so white, so light, that it aroused the necessary strangeness to elicit a different mode of observation of the familiar space. But he also evoked massacres of native people through beautiful gardens of paper roses whose petals were inscribed with messages from the survivors. In the most recent series of mazes he resumes the ironical covering tactics but in walk-through spaces.
Initially, the disconcertment produced by his white plushy walls, felted to the point of making it impossible for visitors to hear the echoes of their own voice, evoked the rooms for schizophrenic people padded to protect them from self-injuries that might result from their hitting their bodies against the walls and somehow allowed the Spector’s to feel their way through the maze of their own silence in regards to the different forms of social violence. Part of the works exhibited transport the recording of his installation, his "mise en scène" devoid of human presence, to painting, which thus restates before the eyes of the viewers the dilemma of mazes with impenetrable walls, as an echo of the insanity of the present-day world.
But in his most recent work, the itinerary resembles more closely its mythical origin. The legacy of the Ariadne’s thread, which allows Thesus to follow its track so that, once the Minotaur is dead, he can retrace his steps and leave, leads Ronald Moran to the construction of mazes on white thread. His work holds a dialogue with numerous references from Duchamp to Richard Sierra or Eva Hesse but it poses a poetics of his own: despite the wall being invisible, despite the fact that starting point and the end are reveled from the outset he seems to tell us that the will to go thought them not only completely, but assuming their fragility and taking responsibility for it, is equally important.
The challenge posed to each viewer in his/her itinerary gives way to the determination to record for the fist time through paintings based on photographs, the human presence, which now appears as trance, fleeting gesture, ceaseless movement; where what is important is being, or having been there. The body, which is also a social dobby, is at the same time thread and labyrinth, a continuous passage under the tension of not tearing the piece, which Moran records rendering visible group dynamics, social networks of which we are different ways of stopping the world, and introducing the strangeness required to generate an alternative vision. It is necessary to enter his labyrinths with sharpened senses, in order to see where we need to go.
