Associação Cultural Videobrasil

The origins of the work of Juan-Pedro Fabra Guemberena come from early on: precisely three and a half decades ago, when the artist was two years old and was deprived of living with his mother for almost six months, as she had been arrested for political reasons. Some time later, when he was eight, his whole family moved to Sweden, escaping the horrors of the Uruguayan dictatorship.

Five years of exile in a completely different culture forged the essence of disquiet that the author now makes into art. Dissolution of difference, the creation of false realities, and notions of homeland and collective identity are central points of his work.

With the return of democracy to Uruguay, the Fabra Guemberenas returned to their homeland, but Juan-Pedro had already brought from his experience abroad two reasons to return to Nordic lands: his interest for art and the need to live in Sweden under different circumstances. This was for the adjustment of personal accounts: the replacement of a “mental prison,” in which he was forced to dive in his childhood, for the liberty to start another life there, completely decided.

The gateway into the new Swedish phase was the disputed Royal Academy of Art in Stockholm, where, from 1997 to 2002, he studied to become a painter. Surrounded by an avalanche of war pictures that had started circling the world due to the North-American invasion of Afghanistan, he decided to use these documents as a starting point for the work that would later catapult him into the international scenery.

From painting to photography and video, Fabra’s gaze crystallized in True Colours the aesthetics that became his trademark. Presented at the 50th Venice Biennale, in 2003, under the concept of Dreams and Conflicts – The Dictatorship of the Viewer, the work reproduced Swedish army members in military maneuvers, in minute detail and through repeated actions, but at no moment can one see reasons to justify the effort of their activities.

“We were faced with a historic moment and from then on would be flooded with television news of war. This led me to think that, as an artist, I did not need to be subjugated by these images, as, in the same way, I could also produce them,” he said in the interview for this FF>>Dossier. “When I started working on True Colours, what most inspired me was what I saw on television news. This was the reason why I found it necessary to use video to speak about that world.”

The option for the electronic medium did not mean he was abandoning his pictorial roots. In all of Fabra’s works, the sequences are carefully composed, colors are carefully studied, and the effects seek to take the gaze of the observer to a degree of total absorption of the “video-screen” that is presented to him/her, without this meaning, however, guarantees that what one sees is, in fact, what is being shown.

Within these purposes, camouflage is to the artist not only a tool of defense and attack used by the characters in his work, but an element catalyzing the aesthetic ideal that interests him. “Since it arose, somehow, camouflage has travelled hand in hand with the history of painting of each country. Studying camouflage in each army is studying a picture chain in these places. From this point of view, and with my painter gaze, I feel attracted to invert the aesthetic process that generates camouflage. I start looking at camouflaged soldiers and, from there, I try to imagine the landscape, what elements I have to create and add to have the final picture.”

In this exercise, the disciplining of human beings curiously takes place amidst the rebelliousness of nature, and it is on cliff sides, on high mountains, and within dense forests that the Uruguayan’s soldiers will blend into the landscape, becoming minerals, vegetables, or animals in a pure state and perfectly blended into their surroundings.

Not only armies are part of Fabra’s menu of investigations; scouts also appear in the artist’s work. In Scout Project, through the usual night photographs, mysteriously and fascinatingly lighted, one sees children prepared for a period of survival in the jungle. Executed after True Colours, the project intended to expand on the approach of strategies of discipline and domination of nature starting at the most tender of ages. “In my head, between operating an axe skillfully and using a greater weapon there may be just a small step,” said the artist.

Married to an architect and dedicated to the task of raising two small children over the last three years, the author says that he is using a pause of “minimum artistic production” to reflect on his life and work. Living in Stockholm, where he is working on a course on camouflage, he is developing three projects in Uruguay, which he visited in April. The first is Graf Spee, a work that he is developing in partnership with artists Jan Håfström and Carl Mikael von Hausswolff and that is being shot in the country.

In 2008, Fabra is going to present an installation at the Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales in Montevideo, Uruguay, in addition to organizing his first large exhibition in his homeland, where there will be recent and ancient works. He is also working on an ample photographic project that is based on a tourist publication from Uruguay, produced by the military regime in the 1980s.

“In the toughest moment for the country, what they wanted to show the world was an updated image of the old dream of ‘Latin American Switzerland.’ In the same way as this book establishes another reality, in my version I am inventing a country that not necessarily shows or represents what Uruguay is today.”