CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS: WHO ARE THEY?
“To designate this new figure of the artist, I have coined the term semionaut: creator of paths within a landscape of signs. Inhabitants of a fragmented world, where objects and shapes abandon the cradle of their original culture to spread across the global space, wandering in search of connections to establish.”
Nicolas Bourriaud
Traditionally, we have defined an artist as one who does something and expresses themselves through material and immaterial forms. That something holds aesthetic and communicative capabilities that can be recognized by individuals and validated within the institutional art world.
Antuan
STONE 432 HZ
2019
Stone and sand
24” x 17” x 14”
Artists have changed over time, progressively finding their independence. Figures such as Leonardo da Vinci defended the autonomy of artists beyond any servitude to the courts, the bourgeoisie, or the church.
Leonardo da Vinci believed that the artist was not only able to create a personal expression but also that such expression could articulate a statement because of the potential transmission of messages and emotions through a visual form understandable to all.
Carlos Bautista Biernnay
Dreams & nightmares
2021/2023
Painting, dyeing, embroidery and sewing machines
Variable measurements
Much time has passed since Da Vinci to the present day. Today, the artist stands before us as a contemporary, current individual engaged in a wide range of concerns that transcend traditional visual formats and mediums, delving into diverse issues from equally diverse perspectives.
The contemporary artist, the artist of the present, displays an alert, awakened subjectivity, open to understanding the world around them and defining themselves through a process of becoming a radicant, constantly evolving as they progress. Who is this artist? a semionaut, equipped to navigate among signs and signifiers, capable of discerning diverse configurations and relationships that capture the complexity of the signifying matters they encounter in a globalized reality.
Jena Thomas
Backyard Ritual
2022
Oil on canvas
38” x 40”
Contemporary artists, the artists of the present, do not confine themselves to a single language, for they grow in multiple directions within the diverse fields of artistic expression they encounter. These artists, as Nicolas Bourriaud writes, “(…) develop themselves as a function of the ground that receives them, follow its convolutions, adapt to its surface (…) translate themselves in terms of the space in which they find themselves (…) Radicant artists invent paths among signs: as semionauts, they set forms in motion, inventing through them and with them paths through which they elaborate on themselves as subjects, while simultaneously constituting their body of work.”¹
Vincent Serbin
Shadowy Toon from Animated series
2020
Oil and enamel on canvas over wood panel and MDF
24” x 36”
Contemporary artists, the artists of the present, conceive themselves within the movement of paths, appropriating and consuming the signifying matter that serves as nourishment for their individual statements, allowing these statements to unfold in time and space.
Eugene Agyei
In the Meantime
2022
Earthenware clay, African cloth, thread, wire, wood, oxidation firing
120” x 82” x 50”
Artists of today are nomads among materials, transcending boundaries between technical and aesthetic specificities. Artists of this era do not cling to fixed identities but rather formulate provisional roots that depend on their radicant nature, the diverse elements they encounter throughout their artistic journey, and, as Leonardo da Vinci suggested, the potential of art to communicate.
¹Nicolas Bourriaud: Radicante, Buenos Aires, Adriana Hidalgo Editores, 2009, pp. 57-59
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