Darwin Guerrero’s Art of Empathy | Contemporary Lynx

Darwin Guerrero scans his immediate social and political setting. He also, somewhat typical of postmodernity, looks for references in art itself. His unique and dexterous approach merges discoveries that are both mentally and affectively engaging.

He’s pursuing an original artistic practice that combines affective and conceptual gestures, intuitive and deliberative strategies. Darwin Guerrero (b. 1986, Cuenca, Ecuador), a contemporary visual artist still in the early stages of his professional career, has gained international recognition through participation in artist residencies and exhibitions across the Americas and Europe, including shows in Ecuador, Mexico, Canada, the United States, Peru, Chile, and Spain. This year, his work, The Boat from the Para ir al cielo series, will be presented at the New York Latin American Art Triennial.

Darwin Guerrero, portrait. Courtesy of the artist

The brain as a creativity machine

To understand and appreciate his skilful practice – rooted in empathy, emotional maturity, and critical overview – we must, however, refer to the primacy of the conceptual art paradigm in contemporary art.

What we know is that the human brain is a creativity machine. It absorbs external data and interprets, completes it in an imaginative way. This means it adds, distorts, and reinvents given information depending on previous resources, affective wiring, and the emotional context of the cognitive situation.

Even though advances in neuroscience and psychology have documented the interconnection and interdependency between emotional and intellectual brain processing, contemporary art since the sixties has overestimated rational exploration, with notable exceptions in feminist, abject, or relational approaches. Artists like Sol LeWitt famously argued that “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art”. The concept and the critique became the ideal reference and measure of quality. Other cognitive and creative strategies were undervalued; wit, intelligence, and critical thinking were king. This fallacy of thinking still has its followers. We can observe it when we read descriptions of works or artist statements claiming that a work or practice is “based on research”.

Darwin Guerrero, [(Aparador - Amparador)3 + 25], 2019. Courtesy of the artist — Darwin Guerrero, [(Aparador – Amparador)3 + 25], 2019. Courtesy of the artist.

This raises a question related to Darwin Guerrero’s practice: Why do so many artists assume the identity of a researcher? Why is being an artist with proper field methodology not enough to be recognised institutionally and critically as an artist?

As we accept that conscious and unconscious brain apparatus cannot be switched off or reduced to only one facet – rationality – what follows is the admission that our brain soaks up external inputs and then makes sense of them in a creative (inventive) way according to our affective setup. We can then see Darwin Guerrero’s practice as more true to the actual process of making sense of the world and creating a vision about it, incorporating both rational and emotional aspects.

Ugly duckling

This year’s SACO Biennale 1.2 takes place in the driest desert in the world, emphasising the link between art and science. It is also where I got to experience Guerrero’s work for the first time. Averío, a site-specific installation grounded in local history, is explained by the artist himself as conceived with “two interpretations or meanings that the Spanish language allows. On the one hand, Averío as a noun refers to a group of domestic, farmyard birds, confined and not free like a flock; on the other, it refers to “breakdown”, something that has been damaged or is dysfunctional.

Averío seduces us with the promise of childhood lightness associated with play, then triggers within us a feeling of disappointed expectation. The installation presents a flock of impossible ducklings – devices we may recall from childhood playgrounds under the name spring riders or duck bouncers. They don’t rock, they don’t spring or bounce, they don’t comfort or excite enthusiasm. Because they are deliberately destroyed. Devoid of their sole function, in their absurd stillness, troubling questions resonate: What kind of childhood are we creating? What bonds have been lost? What is broken about the world in which we are raising our children?

Darwin Guerrero, Averío (de la serie Juguetes_ de lo ingenuo a lo perverso). Courtesy of the artist and the Bienal SACO 1.2

Averío especially resonates with the local public, as it refers to the actual, historic playground composed of duck bouncers in Parque Brasil, where generations of Antofagasta children spent their time. The original structures designed by Jorge Tarbuskovic Dulcic more closely mirrored the natural shape of a duck. As recently replaced by yellow cartoonish ducks, they seemingly serve the same purpose, but something essential was lost.

This work by Guerrero is born from that silent loss: the substitution of the functional for the symbolic. The poetic and critical gesture replaces the useful object. Guerrero triggers an affective response with a critical intervention. He destroys something of cherished value, impregnated with positive emotional charge. Averío reveals in a nutshell how this artist works – through empathy, discomfort, and critical analysis. But it is not the only tool and trick that this artist pulls out!

Carbon copy

Two objects that Darwin Guerrero created [(Aparador – Amparador)³ + 25] (2019) and Proyecto Silla (2015), exemplify how, with a strategy of appropriation, he makes a bridge between the emotional with the intensive conceptual value. It is said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. To copy exposes our deep enchantment with an object or a person that attracts us and provokes strong feelings.

A multisensory installation, [(Aparador – Amparador)³ + 25], is composed of a three-dimensional carbon copy of Ignacio Iturria’s painting, Aparador – Amparador, which profoundly moved Guerrero when he was a child at the Cuenca Biennial in 1994. He wanted to reconnect with that original moment that inspired him to be an artist – and he did for The Uncertainty Principle show organised by the University Museum in 2019.

His version was a multisensor installation, a sideboard sculpted in plasticine, scaled to match the object depicted in Iturria’s original work. He added an eerie soundscape, an infrasonic recording captured at midnight in the University Museum, which was originally built as the first morgue in Cuenca. A photograph of Iturria’s painting was also exhibited as a reference. The mathematical notation in the title suggests both homage and transformation – the original work cubed and expanded by 25 years of accumulated meaning.

[(Aparador – Amparador)³ + 25] resurfaces a known scientific finding that strong emotions enhance memory consolidation – they burn experiences into long-term memory. By creating a replica, the initial moment of enchantment is brought back and materialised. By making a perfect imitation but turning it into a full-bodied object, the artist gives shape to these emotional connections established a long time ago. In the end, the work is not about purely intellectual deliberations about aura, authenticity, simulacrums in art, but about the importance of first loves and fascinations, from which we want to keep tangible memories.

With Proyecto Silla, Darwin Guerrero processes social emotions about an artefact associated with political power. This time, he conducted a social experiment using a copy of the Ecuadorian presidential chair. It was passed to several families as yet another piece of furniture to accommodate in their homes. They could arrange it and use it as they wished. The appropriation of the symbolic object was documented photographically. Given the political character of the chair, the users’ relationship with it correlated with their affinities and divergences about authorities in Ecuador.

Darwin Guerrero, Proyecto Silla. Courtesy of the artist

Guerrero designed a situation where political views and emotions could be expressed and organised using the seat as a prop. Even though it was an imitation, the emotional response that it triggered was authentic and raw. The concept behind the art experiment also captured the power and emotional relations to intangible aspects of the political regime. It allowed people to dismantle the social construction of power itself as its symbol was in their hands, easily manipulated.

Formal seduction

Meanwhile, with Juguetes, Para ir al cielo (2022), Guerrero seduces viewers. The form of the works is puzzling, yet extremely well executed, with profound attention to detail, introducing a certain tension, an uncomfortable gaze, caused by the unusability of the item. Here, the replicas of common items are manipulated and permanently changed.

Para ir al cielo (In order to go to heaven) is composed of two objects: the ladder and the boat. “They maintain the appearance of modes of transit – a boat for sailing, a ladder for ascending/descending – but are constructed to thwart movement”, the artist explains. “In the boat, the extreme curve that almost joins the bow and stern closes the horizon and encloses the journey in an eternal loop. In the ladder, verticality is interrupted before reaching an end, forcing the viewer to pause amid the imaginary ascent”. Instead of directing us towards a common path, forward and outward, they are implying movement inward. In other words, they engage us with the questions: Do we inhabit a physical space, or do we inhabit ourselves? Is being a destination or a journey?

Darwin Guerrero, Para ir al Cielo. Photo by Alessandro Boo. Courtesy of the artist. — Darwin Guerrero, Para ir al Cielo. Photo by Alessandro Boo. Courtesy of the artist

If what keeps us busy, in constant pursuit of a goal, keeps us far away from what we actually need and who we really are. These impossible instruments of transit metaphorically transport us inward to search for the meaning and goals inside of us. As such, Guerrero formally engages in the deconstruction and manipulation of the functional form of toys, a boat, and a ladder, into sculptural, broken, yet appealing items. It is an interjection into the typical brain associations between function and form that also exposes the underlying emotional layer as an important component of the constant activity of our mind to make sense of the world.

The artist, by making the objects paradoxical, absurd, and dysfunctional, invites us to contemplate them, discover them, and confront them. And vice versa, they gaze on the public, they penetrate intellectual and emotional processes and tear up the established connections. These series were developed under the impulse caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, in the context of total disability and uncertainty. The distortion caused by lockdowns seems to generate a very bold device for questioning our reality.

What’s interesting is how the artist refers to idyllic, perfect, innocent realities, of heaven and kids’ playgrounds. Both should be blissful and serene. Guerrero, with the Juguetes series, pulls us to the childhood memories; while with Para ir al cielo, he calls for our imagination of a paradise. And he confronts us with disappointment, even with the grief that everything is beyond repair, even two realities that are pristine and precious like childhood and heaven.

Recalibration and reorientation

In an art world often dominated by purely intellectual discourse, Darwin Guerrero’s practice offers a necessary recalibration – one that honours the full spectrum of human experience in the world, embracing two ways of interconnected filters used by us, humans – affective and rational. His work demonstrates that the most profound artistic insights emerge not from abandoning emotion in favour of concept, but from embracing their dexterous interplay. Through broken toys, a presidential chair in the regular kitchen, and impossible devices, Guerrero creates art encounters where viewers can lean towards critical analysis and an array of conflicting emotions.

Darwin Guerrero teaches us that empathy is not sentimentality, but rather a form of knowledge – one that recognises that to truly understand our world, we must feel it as deeply as we think about it. In doing so, Guerrero points toward artistic practice, one that acknowledges the brain as both a creativity machine and an emotional processor, working in concert to make meaning from the complexity of contemporary life.