The fantasy ontology of Cristhian Godoy

In the creative project of Cristhian Godoy (1995, El Guabo, province of El Oro) cohabit in a genuine way the spectrum of his rural childhood, traumatic personal experiences and imaginary coming from media genres such as fantastic and science fiction cinema. The repertoire on which he relies confronts the profuse universe that speculates on the impact on biological life of the drifts of technological development, focusing on the human body and feeding the non-naturalistic vision of living matter that is increasingly entrenched in our culture. It is impossible to separate the natural form from technological mediation, says Rosi Braidotti. In tune with the spirit that beats in important segments of thought about the "posthuman condition", the creativity of this artist has been stimulated by this acceptance of the nature-culture continuum that runs through Posthumanism, as a thickening of the very idea of humanity with which we coexist.

Godoy is involved in tracing the effects on the sick body of advanced medical supplies: devices, prostheses and drugs that prolong life and guarantee an acceptable quality of life to the point that survival would not be possible without such accessories. In the background, there is a glimpse of a discourse on the vulnerability that we human beings share; a circumstance that, assumed as an imperative of this time, retracts any idealized stereotype of the human figure rooted in the dominant imaginaries of the History of Art. The body that appears here is contingent, malleable and fragile. It is presented in constant transformation influenced by external agents that undermine that organic and proportionate image (divine creature), which once gave birth to canonical metrics.

There are countless handles for the humanoid fictions that the artist presents to us and that seem to increase outside any guidelines, susceptible to unusual and often hilarious formalizations: the whimsical ways of imagining extraordinary beings that nest in the mass media, on the web. Archaic treatises on anomalous entities where science, magic, alchemy and astrology converge. His exploratory excitability has taken him back to key figures of medical literature such as Ambroise Paré (1510-1590), the hairdresser who became a doctor of kings, to whom we owe a polemic study where he classified monsters and unimaginable prodigies trying to give a plausible explanation to eccentric corporealities.

Once upon a time the body..., talks about the famous French cartoon television series Il était une fois... la Vie (1987), a material aimed at children for didactic purposes to address issues of anatomy, healthy habits and different aspects of the functioning of our organism. Its creator, Albert Barille, conceived the scripts in the key of adventures where components of our body proceed as characters and star in defensive events and heroic roles. Godoy's proposal enjoys the sparkle of this saga and that is why its plastic elaboration, rooted between the graphic and the pictorial, does not leave out the humor or the restlessness of the imaginative and curious child.

Despite the fact that behind this block of works there are painful and traumatic personal experiences, the impuberal's inventiveness has not abandoned him. His skills find a way to explore diverse materials and supports commonly associated with the field of medicine, but in a curious symbiosis with the simplest tools of the visual arts and their expressive traditions.

A rural childhood and the limitations of life in the countryside underpin his sensitivity for materials such as plastic "like a specter that protects reed houses" or strapping "that rope that is tied between trees to build clotheslines". Godoy declares his fascination for the unusual, sometimes grotesque images that emerge when nature does its thing on a rope that is tightened on the trunk of a tree.

The work on heterodox materials grants presence to the gesture and catalyzes an energy that in his case, more than providing background or balancing expressive intensities within the plane, shapes the habitat of his characters. Bodies and space derive from the delirious action of painting excited by the material register. Both come from the same matrix: the cosmos that proliferates inside our body; a sectored and classifiable object of study for the field of science, which can become unfathomable and infinite in the creative process.

Everything happens in that extensive and liminal entity that is the human body, always in metamorphosis and affected by an exteriority with which it constantly interacts. Drawing officiates as an indispensable medium that brings vibration and organicity to the forms. The artist defines it as a kind of graphic tachycardia that preserves the stroke of the sketch in which the rare ecosystems where his characters swarm naturally appear. The amplified tissues and internal organs become a stimulus to fantasize with structures that lose their referentiality and are transformed into leafy texture or indiscernible architecture. Godoy insists on the idea of landscape in transition: a non-specific place whose form cannot be defined; an opening to sensitive and mutant microcosms lacking predictability.

Cristhian Godoy's fantasy ontology does not propose an apocalyptic vision, but rather we recognize ourselves laterally in it as portions of a mega-flux where everything has its horizon. There resonates the kind of ecological consciousness proclaimed by thinkers such as Timothy Morton, in which we assume ourselves to be affected by abiotic factors and also by non-human parts, and we appreciate these othernesses as indispensable coexistence in our social space.

Lupe Alvarez
Curator
Miraflores, September 2021, pandemic year