Gabriel Lacomba: Selfportrait

year: 1989.

authors: Manel Huerga .

It's getting harder all the time to find that the particular kind of artists we once called experimemtal or avant-garde. As we step into the XXth century's last decade, cinema has dangerously standardized, heading for aesthetics determined by the luxury of commercials, expensive though scarcely imaginative adventure stories, and, in the end, the empire of television. It's getting harder all the time to find people like Gabriel Lacomba, who will do cinema, and whatever, for the sake of expression needs, but not of commercially conditioned scheme or easy opportunism. His SELF-PORTRAIT he did with-out considering the meanest chances it would have to reach as many people as BATMAN does. This work's great worth lies not in its intuitive discovery of language alone, but in the simple fact that it was done at all, considering -maybe he didn't and he just would not care- the severe condition personal, renewing art is in.

SELF-PORTRAIT explores within the experience of life itself, within our innermost feelings, passions and fears, dissecting anything that brands and will forever brand us... and comes back to us as a very elaborate production, crammed with visual findings that are but the outcome of an exercise in upright honesty, with no concessions, on human nature. There's criticism and self-criticism, love, humour and pessimism in it. There's great deal of imagination/invention in it too -considering the modest equipment engaged- that speaks of an unmistakably promising artist. It is obvius that Lacomba's next works will be more expensive, more ambitious and, most probably, more perfect; but with his SELF-PORTRAIT he has made his point: that cinema in its purest state is still alive.

* About the video AUTORETRAT (SELF-PORTRAIT) in the individual exhibition IMAGO