Art, Money, and Social Anatomy. Luis Salazar

By Pietro Daprano.

Luis Salazar.
Untitled (Art lovers fuck off)
2007.
Mixed media.
56,69 x 55,51 in (144 x 141 cm)

Luis Salazar.
Untitled (Chanel N5).
2007
Mixed media.
55,51 x 65,74 in (141 x 167 cm)

Questioning the cultural stereotypes of contemporaneity is one of the qualities of artist Luis Salazar who, through his paintings, drawings, installations, and intervened objects, seems to activate the sensitive nature of the material to reflect on the erosion of the physical and the worn-out social discourses promoted from the political and economic spheres.

The articulation mechanisms of Salazar’s work establish dynamics of order, regulation, and transformation of thematic axes on which it is common to observe that borderlines between the formal, hybrid, and ironic are fused, developing forms with words and critical devices rooted in images of mass and consumer culture.

In this context, the visual connections of his language are so vast that he expands the conventional concepts of art, social chaos, pre-established criteria on ethics and morals, and the collective vehemence around the political. Likewise, he produces aesthetic metaphors of the contemporary world as if to show the threatening role of human behavior.

Salazar is an enthusiast of producing works related to black humor, sarcasm, and urban fantasies that evoke the biomedical images of the literary anatomy work Gray’s Anatomy: Descriptive and Surgical, popularly known as Henry Gray’s Anatomy of the Human Body or Gray’s Anatomy, which was first published in 1859.

The images of the medical manual are assimilated into Salazar’s representational world to blend with cartoons, logos, brand emblems, and a hundred forms that take us back to the history of avant-garde isms to formulate a proposal for a radical response or, ironically, an art of silence.