image: Jorge Pantoja, Caprtucota, ink on paper, 2023
September 10 - November 5 2023
Jorge Pantoja : Perpetual Inventory
curated by william cordova
When the drummer is gone, 2023
Within the past there is the need to shape the future" - Ming Smith
under the bridge art space is pleased to present, Jorge Pantoja: Perpetual Inventory. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in eight years. Perpetual Inventory, introduces a series of small watercolor, mixed media pieces Pantoja has been working on for the past three years while living in Cuba. Within those three years the artist created a daily ritual of walking and taking snap shots with his cellphone of public moments that arrested his attention. As Pantoja paced himself taking photos through El Vedado (district of Havana) he'd simultaneously share those static moments online through social media platforms where friends and the general public could see and experience his movements and interests. In our contemporary times, we have become familiar with people sharingself-portraits taken in bathrooms, at their meals, of car accidents and going so far as to expose their children's privacy to millions of online viewers.
Philosopher and activist, Susan Sontag once stated, "The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flaneur finds the world 'picturesque." Pantoja, on the other hand, is more of a Third Cinema film auteur utilizing any capable tool to capture the dynamization of space and construct the spatialization of time. Jorge Pantoja is building a "brand new second hand," to shape our space-time perception, a post perspective symbolic form that allude more to options, resisting movement-image differentiation. Pantoja wants us to see how he uses "time-image" to go beyond the limits of "movement-image." He knows that philosopher, Gilles Deleuze stated about cinema, that a "film is never made up of a single kind of frame." Pantoja, like Deleuze, understood that this theorizing of cinema, moving pictures, was also a representation of life as a whole.
"In ancient Japan (Edo Period 1603-1868), the people learned to walk in a special style called Namba walking, in which the arm and the ipsilateral leg are moved at the same time, in contrast to normal walking. This way of walking is more compact and connected, with high upper and lower body integration." Jorge Pantoja is in the synchronized realm of public exercising Namba strategies. His presence, and motions are selfless but never truly absent. His photos are consistently vertical unlike the eye, but very much like a figure. His landscapes never "s-cape" but are liberated digital pixels in the thousands.
Pantoja's last three years have been spent documenting virtual moments but never possessing them individually. His virtual photo journals have been a meditation of fleeting gestures and syncopated plurality. Digital Haikus if you will, rendered with a capitalist product, his I-phone, while never alienating the masses, gestures that prompt the dialectics of Marxist cinema, but we won't get into that Guaguanc6, here. No, our focus for the moment will be Jorge Pantoja's perpetual inventory, the results from his Namba walks, a virtual repository and an infinite cache of works on paper. Works that reveal his inner most recollections, fantasies, realisms. Pantoja divulges the anatomy of his childhood files, libros, comic books, maps, El Vedado, Calle L, Havana y Habana, the architectural randomness of a practiced eye and the literary cosmos of Los Fosfors de el Pionero. Jorge Pantoja's oeuvre echoes, "Viaje alrededor de mi Habitaci6n (1794)" by Xavier de Maistre, but his is of a storyboard made up of graphic observations, analogous to Deleuze's time-image analysis. -William cordova
"I was looking for the sun but it was a candle that illuminateS my path" -Francisco Congo
Quote: -Hong Kai Yap and Raye Chen-Hua Yeow
(An Energy-Efficient Locomotion: Samurai-Inspired Namba Walking)
Artist Biography
Jorge Pantoja was born in Havana, Cuba 1963. Lives and works in Miami. Pantoja's visual art background includes cinema, literature and cartography. His visual art practice started in1992. Exhibitions include, Payo Imperial, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, Verein Berliner Kunstler, Berlin, Germany, NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, Patricia & Philliip Frost Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art (MOGA), North Miami, FL. His work is included in the collections of the Cintas Foundation, NY, Lowe Art Museum, Frost Museum, Perez Art Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), MOGA Museum, Miami, FL. Jorge Pantoja has been featured in Art News, Art in America, The Miami Herald, Art Nexus, MiamiARTzine and Art Pulse Magazine. Recent exhibitions include the Florida, A.I.M. Biennial (2020) and outlaw culture: or higher ground (2018), under the bridge art space, North Miami, FL.
