MANDRAGORA

MANDRAGORA, 2023 by James Bonachea
From The Series Doble Standard Series
Watercolor on cardboard
Image size: 140 cm H x 105 cm W
Unframed

The more transcendental the representation, the more it tends to evoke it through its prodigies. Such is the case of the Double standard series in the words of the artist "It is a process of visual archeology through a search for human representations conditioned by their ritual, aesthetic or utilitarian meaning where a resignification of beauty patterns is proposed, a game with female representation with its multiple meanings, functions and forms”
James Bonachea combines the same motif separated by different forms of representation. The double standard announces a double reading of the original meaning of an image, a polysemic game of signifiers. Doble standard's proposal is an artisan of artisans: it summarizes the wisdom of concretism in time through the human figure and the object as a poetic expression of the time in which Bonachea's works take place.
The discovery of that other time in James' drawings is torn between the earth and the cosmos and each canvas leads us to live a supreme and genuine exercise in trajectories.
This is how the autonomy of the artist is manifested through his proposal as a trigger not only for the passage of man and the sign in time but also for the interrogation of the opposites that the work of James Bonachea questions.
Saul Reyna
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The work of James Bonachea (Cuba, 1977) has been characterized as a constant invitation to re-signify both the beliefs rooted in the cultural imagination, as easily as the objects of everyday use. This practice has led him to the intervention of public and private spaces involving both his own body, as well as organic materials and other elements in settings and surfaces, apparently contradictory, within the formal solutions of visual and pictorial discourses. From performance to drawing, his curiosity for rereading the remote past has directed him to establish dialogues between the historical vision and the current condition of reality, resulting in discursive forms that complement an anachronistic universe of resignifications.