The 1st at Moderna: Valeria Montti Colque

It is a powerful alliance that is about to take place. The city will tie the knot with the power that be. All marital alliances are not based on love, perhaps not this one either. The great city and the power that be have always been married to each other. It is in the city that the power that be often finds the base for the exertion of power.

Valeria Montti Colque creates images that represent human characteristics, virtues and conceptions. In her imagery we encounter characters from all belief systems and worlds of ideas; gods, mythological figures, heroes and magical spirits, embodiments of human beliefs and hopes for a meaning of our existence. It may be Jesus the Saviour, Icarus burnt by the sun, or wrathful war gods. They all live side by side with the humans in Valeria Montti Colque’s imagery. One may think that they don’t belong in the same world. But it is not about individual religions or thought complexes, but about individual human beings.

Valeria Montti Colque graduated from the Royal University College of Fine Arts in 2004. Her artistic expression was certainly different from that of most of her fellow students. Her work could not be confined by the white cube. I don’t think that she has ever cared about relating to the white cube – a room both loved and hated by artists and to which they often have to relate. I would go so far as to say that Valeria’s art does not relate to rooms at all – it eats rooms. It grows out of rooms. It always seems to want to break out and move forward. Valeria’s art is an expanding power that cannot be contained by art spaces. It may start there, but it will soon push forward. Out into the street. Into society. In amidst the people. Collaborations with other people are central to Valeria Montti Colque’s art. In relation to other artists – musicians, performance artists, family and friends – her images come to life. The collaborations also create something new, beyond the control of the artist. Her images turn into autonomous individuals. Valeria has participated in several performance constellations, such as The Dragons and The Tranzformers.

In a sense, her work reflects, in a rather cynical way, the development of society. The financial experts’ dream of eternal growth – in a world where the difference between desire and need is being blurred – is reflected in a rather horrid way in Valeria Montti Colque’s art. Valeria consumes. She eats the crumbs of our consumption. She spits them out and creates something new and original. The invisible monster of our society is given a body, a framework, flesh and bones of steel, silicon and plastic. The willingness to commit violence to reach our goals, as individuals or as a collective, is also ever present in the background. The figure of the military recurs constantly in Valeria Montti Colque’s imagination: the general, the individual soldier, the guerrilla soldier. All those who took up arms in order to make their voices and ideas heard force their way towards us, the viewers, wherever we look in her art.

Valeria Montti Colque was born in 1978 in Stockholm to Chilean parents, who left Chile in 1974 to find a new home in Sweden, bringing with them experiences of Latin American culture and traditions and the visions of the 1960s Latin America. It was a Latin America that had experienced what the struggle for power can lead to. These experiences are shared by many people living in Sweden, but we seldom talk about them. Sweden is a country that has not fought a war since the 16th century. My generation of ethnic Swedes was brought up in a world where war was something that only existed on television.

Valeria Montti Colque’s exhibition coincides with the exhibition Time & Place: Rio de Janeiro 1956 – 1964, which takes place in the adjacent galleries. The exhibition presents a new wave of artistic expressions that swept over Brazil and particularly Rio de Janeiro in the mid 1950s, focusing on the advance of neo-concrete art, a non-figurative art comprised of abstract geometrical compositions. The exhibition reflects the seething artistic activities in Brazil up to 1964, when there was a military coup and many artists left the county. The conditions changed. The art world came to a stand still.

The curator of the exhibition, Professor Paulo Venancio Filho, has a theory. According to him, abstract geometric art was for Rio what surrealism was for Paris. Surrealism emerged in old, traditional Europe. In Rio de Janeiro, a city that underwent radical modernisation and urbanisation in the 1950s, the neo-concrete artists’ vision of an abstract geometric art became surreal. The organised and well-ordered became surreal.

Valeria Montti Colque and many other contemporary artists, who were brought up in a time when western, affluent society was at its peak, respond to society in ways that may be described as surreal. In recent years there has been a wave of new art with a surreal impact. Individual fantasies, dreams and nightmares are being externalised in art. Valeria Montti Colque’s experiences seem to have provided her with the foundation for creating a strikingly special world – a world that resembles no other. Welcome to our winter wedding.

Ulf Eriksson