Niño Grande

My gods are better than yours

When Jasper Johns deliberately chose “Things the mind already knows” he tried to force the viewer’s vision out of the painting as an act, a process and an art to focus the concept of seeing in oneself. But what is this collective mind that Jasper Johns presupposes? What are these objects that we already know and how much say what we are? How is the object confronted as a universal icon over the regional and local?

In the series “Garrafas”, not the object itself is disputed, but rather that the “we” as a collective mind and the limits of that collective unconscious and its possible geopolitical re-delimitation. We are the shared experience that is printed on everyday objects. Can you draw a boundary between those who recognize the object and those who don’t? Is my experience on this different object? Better?

“My gods are better than yours” are probably the first words of a conqueror when arriving in a
distant land or the naive nucleus of all discussion. It is the limit between them and us. It is at that point that the inside is delimited. outside, what is our own and what is foreign and we recognize ourselves in a community that exceeds and overflows beyond the pre-established limits of borders, currencies, gods and flags.