The Sala de las Caballerizas of the Torreón de Lozoya houses until the 12th of September the work by Isabel Albertos Johnston, an artist from Segovia trained at the Facultad de Bellas Artes of the Universidad Complutense and at ECAM (Escuelas de Cine y Televisión de Madrid). With the title of The fear of being invaded. I (heart) Cargo the exhibition presents three series of illustrations–including the sheets from the series named Afrikanistas– which make reference to the hybrid and wild universe of a practice that brings to our attention the weaknesses and the grotesque aspects of the nature of human passions, along the guidelines of the teachings followed by Marcel Dzama and the rest of the artists from The Royal Art Lodge group (Neil Farber, Michael Dumontier, Drue Langlois…) in the past decade.

The fear of being invaded evolves around a vision of American culture situated in the threshold between attraction and rejection. It is a paradox described in the catalogue of the show in the following words: “Over an iconic background characteristic of the American style, settled in the collective subconscious of many generations through its cinematographic and TV influence, a feeling that something does not work comes from the combination between the model background of the American ideal in stereotypical scenes familiar to the spectator and characters that do not quite blend with the surroundings”. Ultimately, a habitat dominated by colour and the minimum textures, filled with figures situated on the most proximate margins to Surrealism and installed in the great, social, American paradox.

The popular references in the work Isabel Albertos Johnston situate her in the realm of painting and illustration as a form of satire. It has a heavy sociological -and sometimes-anthropologic load. This is the case of I (heart) Cargo, the series conceived as an anachronism of the cargo cults of New Guinea in the 21st century. According the artist herself: “Part of the anthropological phenomenon of the cargo cults … emerging during the period in which the preindustrial tribal societies establish a contact with the advanced Occidental society, results in a series of rituals that imitate a white man’s behaviour with the purpose of obtaining that ‘charge’ (or material goods) through religious and magical liturgies”.

Afrikanistas includes sixteen figures through which a ficticious world is recreated where disguise is combined with ritualistic elements. Masks, feathers and totems that work as props for a contemporary aesthetic defined by new social models that create an original cultural identity. A new disguise that denotes the value of clothing in contemporary social uses, shortening the distances between this society –technological, scientifical and modern- and another pagan society that lives with the natural, the primitive and superstition. The exhibition, The fear of being invaded. I (heart) Cargo will remain open at the Torreón de Lozoya of the Obra Social Caja Segovia until the following 12th of September. Alejandro Martínez

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