Camila Cañeque: the art of inaction

Camila Cañeque (1984-2024) is a young artist who died prematurely who interests me because she has traversed a territory inhabited by denial, stillness and disappearance fundamental aspects for the Cause of Art. These principles are found in Camila's work, as she wrote in a letter to her mother in 2015 about artistic creation: “I have found that the common thread in all my work is something like an art not d 'action, but of inaction. In the frame or final work there is always a component of fatigue, it always implies a passivity in front of a moving world (as the only lucid alternative). Being exhausted, the subject exhausted, the time exhausted. By saturation, by boredom, by abuse, by whatever”.

This obsession with the final moment, running out of time and tiredness led her to make a book: 'The Last Sentence' which consists of 452 fragments that collect the final moment of great works of literature. This "Perequian" operation immediately attracted the attention of Enrique Vila-Matas, a writer who is not given to vain praise and who considered this book as a sample of beauty, method and style.

I allow myself to interact with art history and realize that Camila is in the same orbit as the German-American artist Eva Hesse (Hamburg 1936-NY 1970) who died prematurely like her, but who lived long enough to leave an emblematic work, as Camila has done. Both work with light, ductile materials of little relevance, Hesse with latex, fiberglass, papier-mâché or twine and Cañeque with space and emptiness, minimalist neatness and evanescence; by their characteristics they are destined to a progressive deterioration over time, even to their disappearance, an end point, like an ice cream in the sun, as Camila did in 'Wasted Time' (New York, 2018) . Camila in her work makes an allegory of her own existence: doing nothing. Stillness is indicated by all the objects he uses: mattresses, deckchairs, his lying or sitting body, chairs, the famous image of his body stretched out on the ARCO floor and his own death in bed while sleeping.

'The sleeping theatre', Camila Cañeque (2019)

The oxymoron doing nothing is the key to the life and work of the two artists. The foreboding nature of the art made Eva and Camila die as they created. His works are made in the spirit of negation and nothingness, stillness and disappearance become an allegory of the inevitable expiration of all things, of all people. This is his own attitude, in wanting to do the same with life. The restlessness and quietism of inaction is not exclusive to Camila, it coexists together with the pain of a generation very well represented by the philosopher Eloy Fernández Porta author of the great book 'Los brotes negros. Peaks of anxiety' (Anagrama, 2022).

My natural tendency towards bonism makes me wonder if this uneasiness in which they both lived, this end point could not be avoided, as Sol Lewitt wanted with Eva Hesse telling him to let go of personal concerns like doubting, fearing , suffer, stop messing with your hair or scratching your back.