Sweet are the uses of adversity: Jorge Tacla finds truths amid traumas at SAF

Jorge Tacla, a third-generation Chilean artist of Palestinian and Syrian descent who has been working between Santiago and New York since 1981, brings four decades of paintings, drawings and installations to Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF). The exhibition, on view in SAF spaces at Galleries 1, 2 and 3 in Al Mureijah Square, Sharjah City (Feb. 8 – Jun. 7), is titled after a line from poet, essayist and playwright T.S. Eliot’s poem The Dry Salvages (part of Four Quartets).

An AI Overview notes that the line is a paradox; it implies that “time erodes individual lives and memories (“destroyer”) while simultaneously cementing history, endurance, and collective experience (“preserver”). It suggests that decay and preservation are inseparable parts of the same temporal process.”

Time the destroyer is time the preserver examines how enduring truths can be excavated in the aftermath of destruction. Structured as eight chapters, the show brings together over 170 works including paintings, drawings and a large-scale installation. The exhibition opens with the chapter titled ‘Body and Violence’, which features the artist’s early figurative works from the 1980s, when he was immersed in the Black and Hispanic cultural spheres of New York’s East Village. Drawing on Francis Bacon’s depictions of bodies in agony, works such as Untitled (1985) and Diciembre (December, 1988) were produced amid escalating racial tensions and the emergence of the 24/7 news cycle.

Hidden Identity 163, 2022.

The chapter also introduces works from ‘Cuaresma en Atacama /Out of Focus’ (1989), developed after the artist’s time in Chile’s Atacama Desert. The landscape is explored more in the second chapter titled ‘Remembering the Desert’ with paintings such as Logical Product #2 (1992) and Paraíso (Paradise, 1994). In these works, the inclusion of what the artist calls ’remnants of the living’ subverts the colonialist notion of desert expanses as ‘empty’. From here, the show turns to architecture as a recurring motif through which Tacla tracks the contours of hegemony and resistance. The third chapter called ‘A Geopolitical Triangle’, Distribución de los Primarios (The Distribution of the Primes, 1995) provides an aerial view of the Pentagon, while Ciclo de Nitrógeno (Nitrogen Cycle, 1996) isolates the bombing of Santiago’s La Moneda Palace during the 1973 US-backed coup against Salvador Allende.

The fourth chapter titled ‘Injury Report’ addresses censorship and ideological suppression under Chile’s military dictatorship. The section is comprised of a multimedia installation titled Informe de Lesiones (Injury Report, 2016–2019), composed of framed remnants of burned documents, including hospital and police injury reports. The artist has also set fire to some of his own notebook drawings in a symbolic gesture expressing affinity with poets, writers and artists who had been silenced in Chile and elsewhere. Gallery 2 is dedicated to Tacla’s notebook drawings, which form the focus of the fifth chapter called ‘Anatomy of Dyslexia’. Produced daily since 2011 as part of a morning ritual, the works provided the source material for ‘Anatomía de la Dislexia (Anatomy of Dyslexia’, 2017–2021), a series of portraits of cultural figures such as theorist Roland Barthes, writer Diamela Eltit and poet Juan Luis Martínez.

August 4th-Beirut N1, 2020.

The sixth chapter titled ‘Scenes of Protest’, shifts toward collective resistance and mass protest through works from the artist’s long-running series ‘Señal de Abandono (Sign of Abandonment’, 1999–ongoing). In producing Octubre 25, 2019 No. 4 and No. 5 (both 2022), which depict Chile’s 2019 uprising, or May 25, 2020 (2020), a response to the death of George Floyd, Tacla focuses on moments of resistance rather than graphic imagery of violence. Pushing back against a growing ‘compassion fatigue’, the seventh chapter, called ‘Hidden Identities’, surveys works from Identidades Ocultas (Hidden Identities, 2005–ongoing). In these paintings, Tacla depicts violence by proxy, substituting human bodies with architecture, furniture and farming equipment. For example, Identidad Oculta 148 (2019) uses the image of a tractor to references the killing of Mapuche activist Camilo Catrillanca, while in Identidad Oculta 58 (2014), a disturbing coastal view recalls the ‘death flights’ of the Pinochet regime.

The exhibition concludes with a visual field of modern catastrophes that dislodges viewers from fixed positions of contentment and moral certainty, most probably produced by comfort zones. In the last chapter titled ‘Rubble’, Tacla juxtaposes the aftermaths of political conflict and natural disaster across Aleppo, Beirut, Gaza, Homs, Oklahoma City and Santiago, alongside the devastation from earthquakes in Haiti and Japan. The works are punctuated with compositions that microscopically analyse trauma within the human body. Jorge Tacla: Time the destroyer is time the preserver is curated by Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, SAF President and Director, with Abdulla Aljanahi, Curatorial Assistant at the Foundation. Much of Tacla’s work surveys spaces of social rupture, situated in the joints of the architectures that arise in the wake of catastrophe.

Jorge Tacla in his studio.

He perceives the devastation resulting from such events as an opportunity to investigate structural systems that would otherwise remain unseen. Tacla studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, and moved to New York in 1981. Since that time, his paintings have been exhibited internationally in galleries, museums and biennials. He has also produced several permanent installations, including murals for a museum in Santiago and a civil court in New York. In 2019, the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art acquired his papers, including his drawings, correspondence, photographs, notebooks and clippings. Spanning nearly 40 years, the holdings provide a look into the fluctuating histories of the New York and Santiago art worlds.