Benito Laren · 12.05.2012 - 22.06.2012

Casino

curatorial text

Rafael Cippolini

All in

More than ever, Laren is playing “all in”.

If his work was assimilating, in the last twenty years, all those ways that the nicoleño artist’s alien unconsciousness considered fundamental in his vision of the world (spaceships, national heroes, movie stars, haute-couture, beasts, money wheels, snowshoes, tennis, cellphones, geometric art, politicians, car doors and an exaggerated etcetera that would make even a distinguished classifier like John Wilkins dizzy), this time he plunged, with his usual impudence, into one of his biggest dreams: a casino as gigantic as a planet.

The classic by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott, Learning from All Things (although a more exact title would have been Learning from Las Vegas) comes to mind. Nobody disputes that this summit of architectural theory that the so-called “father of pop and postmodernism” wrote with his wife, divided the waters and founded – even without intending to do so – a new anthropological dimension. A great point of cultural concentration continues to be deduced from its pages.

But the Laren thing is another delusion. Even different from that of Bugsy Siegel, that mythical gangster (appropriately played by Warren Beatty) who recast the largest city in the state of Nevada.

Let’s review this scene: in the early 1990s, and in the face of malicious attacks by those who defined the production of Rojas’ artists as “light”, Gumier Maier shot a ta-te-ti of letters that doubled the bet: “Ours it is not light. It’s bright. ” The bright, of course, concentrates so many more proteins.

Laren not only assimilated this homophony, but raised it to runaway powers. With each new release, more shine, more givré, more star.

Of course, he doesn’t think at all about Warhol’s Brightness, but all the semiosis that erupts with what any casino represents.

It could not be otherwise, always attentive to the impeccable coherence of his career. If not a few of his biographers agree that the starting point of his aesthetic adventure begins with that great portrait of a tiger (symbol and sign of a supermarket with the same name in his hometown), painting on glass today owned by the Blanton Museum of Art , from Texas, this time her pupils stopped at the Trilenium Casino. That is, in another Tiger, this time a delta.

360º of a plan to conquer not only art.

A circle as perfect as the most characteristic of roulette wheels.

Undoubtedly, this is a sample for you to drop much more than a tab.

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