Human-Mind (2024)

Curator Jordi Garrido
Arranz Bravo Foundation
Hospitalet de Llobregat
Barcelona

Ezequiel Rosenfeldt: A human approach

Something inchoate and ethereal once alighted briefly, skipping like a stone across
the surface of our culture, leaving its faint, tenuous impression in the human clay, a
footprint that we cast in concrete and apparently remain content to genuflect before
for decades, centuries, millennia .
Alan Moore (Fossil Angels, 2002)

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, the hominids who inhabited the Earth struggled to survive. They had to face all kinds of challenges to survive: from the climate to the possible predators of their environment. This caused these hominids to develop brain capacities superior to other mammals and, little by little, to become a new species that would become dominant on the entire planet: Homo sapiens. 

Ezequiel Rosenfeldt (Buenos Aires, 1977) focuses his work on the brain capacities of what was already defined as the current state of the human being and its consequences. First, they led to the creation of tools and, later, simple machines that made life easier for the first humans: the wheel and fire are the most basic in these kettles of our ancestors. However, what interests us is that this evolution towards the thinking, self-aware and creative being has brought all the advances that today permeate our daily lives: from microwaves to Wi-Fi, through cars, watches and submarines, we have reached the point in that this generative and solving drive has led to the creation of a widget with the possibility of creating new ones. Obviously, we mean inorganic intelligence, artificial intelligence.

Human-Mind starts from a pictorial cycle that pivots on the idea of opposition between biological intelligence, the result of the evolution of the hominid towards Homo sapiens, and non-organic intelligence, born from the elements created by the previous one. In the process that leads to the creation of non-organic intelligence, Rosenfeldt points to a process that has gone through the creation of three stages of the Homo sapiens intellect: the Controlling Mind, the Creative Mind and the Conquering Mind, all three integrated in the pictorial cycle that concerns us. These three mindsets are what determine how, over the centuries, human beings have progressed by overcoming the different problems they have had to face, leading, in the last instance, to the creation of an intelligence that it goes beyond the physical limits of the body itself: an intelligence based on algorithms, databases and supercomputer networks. 

This opposition between biological and non-organic is thought of as a natural process rather than as a criticism of machine intelligence. If organic intelligence is a direct evolutionary expression of the human genome, inorganic intelligence is an indirect expression of this same human essence. Therefore, the existence of thinking machines – even if these are lines of code – is nothing but the logical consequence of the need that the human mind has developed to create new ways to solve the problems inherent in existence.

Through a pictorial language based on the line and which approaches visual references such as the black and white of William Kentridge or the expressiveness of the stroke of Frank Auerbach or De Kooning, Rosenfeldt goes into what is not really it is more than a new tension, a new duality of those that have shaped the human condition until now: a constant tug-of-war between the individual self and the collectivity, between spirituality and rationality, or between what is material and immaterial. The coexistence of the human mind with the machine is a new chapter in this dialectic. We cannot ignore that the artist addresses in this subject asubject that has been and is one of the great subjects of both debates on scientific ethics and popular culture of the 20th and 21st centuries, with examples as famous in cinema as Matrix (Wachowsky brothers, 1999), Ghost in The Shell (Mamoru Oshii, 1995 ), 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) or Her (Spike Jonze, 2013), to name a few examples. Rosenfeldt is not at all alien to this imaginary, and beneath the hieratism of his paintings hides the infinite curiosity that has led filmmakers and writers to question – often with rather dramatic perspectives – the coexistence between man and nature machine While it is true that in the case of the artist we are dealing with, the perspective is not, by any means, catastrophist, on the contrary: the artist suggests that this coexistence will lead humanity to a new understanding, a interest in the different  

After all, Rosenfeldt is doing nothing more than what humanity has done following the path that has brought us here: to follow the impulse that we as human beings feel to respond to what disturbs us. 

Jordi Garrido

Art Cuator