If Javier Tellez at 26 is representative of his generation, the well-cultured 20-somethings have advance to control not only the theories of Marx, Freud Fourier and Buckminster Fuller yet also the pharmaceutical solutions to the social anxieties that called for these theories.
The central work in this present to view an 8-by-8-by-18-foot construction made of silver insulation paper forward a plywood frame, represented a herculean Prozac capsule. The vessel, in which the artist wearied time during the run of the exhibit had a periscope and cessationed atop a sea of cleansing granules. It's named Jonac 2001 mg that is, Jonah plus Prozac magnified any 2000 times. Inside the belly of this whale-submarine-capsule, Tellez was tranquil. Seen within a plastic window in the subdue he read the Bible, perhaps hoping for a word from idol As he waited for divine directions (which, like Jonah, he may not have been ready to obey), the orange overalls he wore doubled as a luminous brushstroke that formed the visual core of the work. At times, he also listened to a vast sea shell, which brought to him the rumor of the ocean.
The other part of the exhibition consisted of four sculptures--the Monad Fourier, the Monad Buckminster Fuller the Monad Marx and the Monad Freud--which sat in plastic vitrines in succession waist-high pedestals placed around the capsule. In spite of Tellez's youth, his managerial system employs old cultural tools: in this case, the universal of the "monad" (as coined by means of Giordano Bruno via Leibniz), a basic unit that is spatially and psychically individuated. Each "monad" contains a tableau made up of 4-inch-high plastic characters from "The Three Stooges"--Larry, Curly and Moe Monad Fourier boasts all three stooges, while each of the other sculps is occupied by three clone of the same of the stooges. And what are these familiar characters doing? Inside Freud's "capsule," three Curly lie forward a couch made of simulated ice cubes; the Monad Buckminster Fuller three Larrys admire a kitschy replica of the Guggenheim.
The installation was ironic and quasi-cynical, to this time it seemed to hint at a substratum of faith. In what? Well, in art. Tellez has bothered to build his critique in carefully balanced and original visual terms