Quincalla Museum: Rorro Berjano

Rorro Berjano. Quincalla Museum.

The main quality offered by symbols, as Juan Eduardo Cirlot teaches us, is their "polyvalence of meaning", their capacity to open up diverse meanings in a fertile simultaneity. We turn to symbols when we need to go beyond the limits of language, when we need to achieve an "excess of meaning" for what we feel compelled to express and communicate. This, in my opinion, is the powerful recourse to the symbolic in the work of Rorro Berjano (Mérida, 1979). From that place, he launches into his approach to the limits, so blurred in our times, between religions, spirituality, popular culture and mass culture, whose symbols he reshapes, accumulates and resignifies with a view to making them explode in their multiple possibilities of meaning.
    Quincalla Museum is the result of a trip made by Rorro Berjano to Dakar (Senegal) in 2019. It is the result of the aesthetic shock that he experienced when he set foot in Africa for the first time and found there a paradoxical coexistence between its exuberant nature and the overflowing spiritual charge of its culture, on the one hand, and its singular reception of the symbols and icons of the mass culture of the West, on the other. This is the setting for this exhibition by Rorro Berjano, in whose work Africa had already been very present through Caribbean religious syncretism and its animist systems, central iconographic references in his previous works. After exploring this African cosmogony transculturated to the Caribbean, in this new journey he has gone to the roots, entrusting everything to the curiosity of instinct, to his amazing capacity to investigate what remains of enigma and mystery in this de-sacralised world. This led him to Dakar's interest in primitivism and the search for pure artistic forms uncontaminated by the Western canon, as happened to artists of the historical avant-garde such as Picasso and André Breton. However, perhaps the main discovery of his journey was that mixture of symbols of the ancestral African cultures and mass culture that nowadays traces the landscape of the continent. This is echoed in this exhibition, in which, to cite one example, the heroism of the Laamb wrestlers coexists with icons of consumer society such as Gucci or Lacoste. If he intervenes on the former in a sense of exaltation and dignification, in contrast, from his re-reading and resignification of the iconic elements of mass culture, what Rorro Berjano's lacerating sarcasm does is to stick his sharp punch into the weak frontier between the original and the copy, the emptiness of the true and the noble strategy of falsification.
Finally, it is worth mentioning in this exhibition, in addition to his disturbing group of ceramic pieces and the desire for installation that accompanies each work, the use of old metal sheets as a support for his paintings. The recovery of these materials discarded through the wear and tear of their use, already put into practice by Art Povera, Manolo Millares, Robert Rauschenberg or Julian Schnabel, are undoubtedly the "canvas" most in keeping with the complex framework that Rorro Berjano has set up in this Quincalla Museum. Let us remember that quincalla, according to the definition of the RAE, is a "set of metal objects of little value". However, Rorro Berjano's aim is precisely to rethink the relativity of the value of the object, and he does so through the aesthetic dignification of waste, of the discarded, of the apparently useless and unusable. Therein lies his devotion to what he himself calls "the beauty of decadence". In this way, those same rusty metal sheets, which make up the walls of the houses of so many Africans, are here the home that welcomes his painting, they are the door from which we are assaulted by his testimony of that reality, with all its burden of enigma and conflict.
Miguel Ángel Rivero Gómez
Professor of aesthetics & Arts theory.