Here we want to talk about the “internal architecture” of two figurative devices and the mutually inclusive relations produced by an empiria of reception in which mass culture, the self-reflectivity of advanced art, the conventionalization of paper money, the serialization of secondary images, the capitalist colonization of the aesthetic and the institutionalization of the transgressive were constituted as spaces of theory surrounding these objects. Omar Calabrese writes in the essay entitled Intertextuality in painting, a reading by Holbein's ambassadors that “the more one seeks a verisimilitude effect, the more one must resort to a maximum of artifice”. The explicit regulatory intensification in the photojournalistic language of Guerrilero Heroico (1960), the awareness of an outsider, the intuitive and “opportunistic” preparation of the moment (the moment when Che disintegrates from the crowd that day in March 1960 and becomes a photographic target), a mise en scéne of a compositional technique that “hides the conflict” between “the depth” of photography, the “mimetic space”, and the “surface” of photography, “the space of sensorial activity”; it is all that proper materiality of the act of photographing that qualifies the Korda's philosophical image problem: the use of a structural machine to construct the memory of a resemblance implies a discussion about the true and the identical; a discussion in which the intertextual condition of the “depth” of the image prevails over the static condition of the “surface” of the image.

Rodrigo's exercise of perceptual strangeness, a Che circumscribed to an oculus and materialized by an extended collection of bottle caps, as if to reiterate this dual nature of surface and depth, of appearance and ambiguity of the iconic sign. Korda's photograph is inseparable from a conflict that occurs over the status of the concrete and formerly living individual when he is transformed into a “surface”, when his current reality becomes a symbolic container where, as in this case, myth and chic radicality hide in the abstraction of the romantic rebel, the anti-imperialist thinking of a Latin American Marxist, of an individual (still uncomfortable for the status quo of the contemporary West) who, inverting the terms of the tragic and isolated hero, managed to live the life he wanted to live, succeeded to be the humanity that wanted to affirm and experienced the revolutionary shock of the humanity of those dominated of the XXth century. The exaltation of this image as a visual text written with a thousand hands begins in the year of Che Guevara's death. In fact, there is a complicated genealogy of agents who mediatize this Korda cliché. Una Cuba libre por favor, joins the expansion of this historical and interpretive series by Guerrilero Heroico (1960). Rodrigo Oliveira produced an intersystemic object (a work in contact with the generative power of other works and the discretion of other discourses), using art history, the pictorial culture of portraiture (where the tactility of children's art and sophisticated facture play hidden), post-impressionist modernity and visual language games associated with research in optics and perceptual therapies.

This object argues against the isolation to which the artistic field continues to be subjected in the world of political manifestations and strategies of alterity. Art no longer seeks the place of political transformation as its place of transformation but seeks to ensure that its operational need to renew itself is not transformed into the spectacle of freedom. The power of this collective symbol whose interpretative key has different synchronies, all of them true for the image but only a few for the observed subject, encourages the character “Che” to be presented in Una Cuba libre as a strange flower where a prototype (a unique, unrepeatable Che, a story that can no longer be seen as a simulacrum) converges in a repetition (Che as an idea as an idea).

Pedro Pousada
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