In our day to day we look for signs, associations or designs that might tell us where to continue our path. Sport, work, play and even our choice of music are driven by the playback of tracks and random events that make up our luck.
Destiny fascinates us. Perhaps because we hold recurring desires, however momentary, to shed all responsibility for our acts, to be released from having to decide at every step, and far less to bear the consequences. Fate is a reminder of that which is greater than us and which we cannot control. It is for this reason that chance interests us, because sooner or later it may play a decisive part in our fortune. For the same reason, probably, the fortuitous terrifies us, and across several centuries we have not managed to shed that vital uncertainty, the same one that drove the Greeks to consult the pythonesses about their destiny, asking questions that ranged from whether it would rain the next day to whether they would conquer some kingdom in a time to come.
More recently, François Ewald claimed that «for the surrealists, the truth about themselves and about the world is found in the very production of the uncertain. Hence their systematic recourse to techniques that favor chance». Those who took part in this movement believed there existed a kind of hidden source of meanings, a whole to which people were connected through the unconscious; what stood in the way of reaching that spring, however, was reason. And so they sought out and invented alternatives that would free them from logical operations, centering their interest on dreams and on free association. In this imaginary the artist, through techniques such as automatism, would be the one charged with revealing the true by mending the broken bond with the universe.
In contrast to this, for Daniel Pérez Coronel (Mexico City, 1984) contingency reveals or offers what Benjamin H. D. Buchloh calls an «immediate feeling of universal equivalence and total irrelevance of images». That is, through his work Pérez Coronel declares that there is no entity able to withstand the challenge of proving its originality, that creation is no more than a quotation — at times veiled by the unconscious — and that no process belongs to a single author. In a very Santayanan attitude, the artist suggests that life and the world are not the work of the gods, since perhaps these do not exist, and that reality is made up of events generated by an insignificant coincidence.
As the starting point for the show titled Trece, Daniel analyzed his earlier work, drew up a list of words he associated with it and divided them into five groups: concepts, materials, actions, formal aspects and aesthetic principles. He then numbered each of these words so that the digits would correspond to those of five dice, and threw them repeatedly to chance. The resulting combination of numbers, in a kind of Lullian remembrance, also yielded the words that would serve as parameters for making each of the pieces that make up the exhibition.
The body of work that Pérez Coronel retweets and develops is deliberately subjective and self-sufficient, produced with practically no budget (he got the soil from repairs recently carried out on the street where he lives), and it reminds us that, in the words of Lourdes Andrade, «adventure in language, in the street or in dreams, comes to break the immense wall of tedium made of predictable situations and daily routine».