Campo Base.
Texto de Berta Sichel para el catalogo campo base. 8.09.08. Ingles.
Generation X is the generation of people whose cultural influence peaked in the 1990s, when Ramon David Morales (Seville, 1977) was a teenager and probably spent his time listening to alternative rock, Britpop, hip hop, techno, club and dance music or playing with computers and video games. Generation Xers like to say they are free–thinking individuals in a globalized world and that personal computers and the Internet brought them together through chats, Messenger and – more recently – blogs. Ramon David Morales belongs to this generation, for whom the act of cutting and pasting is part of the culture, just as a DJ mixes sounds in a club.
As Morales explains, his creative process began with a "drawing–idea" which he later uses as a road map to explore all kinds of stories for which his pictures are merely snapshots. His work plunges us into the aesthetic of hyperrealism, in which – as philosopher Jean Baudrillard said in Simulacra and Simulation (1992) – the "real and the imaginary are confounded in the same operational totality," calling for a "kind of sixth sense for fakery, montage, scenarios".1 David Morale's representation of nature's disenfranchisement posits that "the world" has different manifestations at different times. In much of his work, he adopts a false misunderstanding? consciously confounding nature and artifice and making beautiful appropriations of manmade artefacts, both real and hypothetical. He seems to enjoy the ambiguity of the resulting objects. Thus, Veleta, de como abandonar la ciudad (2007) is an installation in which he simultaneously evokes the idea of confusion and freedom. Inspired by old road signs pointing to different destinations at a crossroads, Veleta is a kind of commentary on the unnatural nature of the objects as well as an object in its own right. In any case, this and other pieces by Morales, such as Carretera sin fin o eterno retorno (2007) – a kind of sculpture mocking a moving walkway – challenges the way we tend to decode our "normal" perceptions of the world around us.
David Morales encourages the viewer to see the actual visual world as an object–as–depicted as well as an object–idea, closer to the drawings–ideas which are the basis of his creative process. At the same time, he directs the viewer's mind and eyes to different contexts, playing with the syntactic possibilities of the pictorial.
On the other hand, his work interacts with the mind, stimulating imaginary travels. The interplay between presence and absence may owe something to the emergence of virtual reality and cyberspace, raising questions about the transition from material to virtual, encompassing the representation of landscapes, subjectivity and narrative.
As in a virtual space, David Morales' body of works is neither here nor there, neither purely real nor purely imaginary. In his work we sense that something has happened, but the final intention is left uncertain. We are not sure if it is sinister or if he is just having a really good time.
Like a virtual environment, David Morales' installations, paintings, sculptures and objects – if we can really use the current terminology to describe what he does – condenses many moods and provokes multiple interpretations. There is a tension between the material, or physical, world, represented by the found objects in the room and the "virtual landscape" symbolized by the dichotomy of presence and absence. Although the computer typically found in most virtual environments is missing, we get the feeling of a mental space removed from the present reality. The alternating effects of the material and the virtual lend autonomy to the various aspects of the installation, yet each is indebted to the others for the articulation of meaning. In his work, nature and artifice coexist to make up an unlikely composition in which the natural world is a fiction which is not completely imaginary. Together, they resemble a tableau vivant in which the object (or idea) has been removed but the allusion to it remains.