Jason Mena’s Postmodern Surrealist Scenarios

Jason Mena. Todo es mentira, 2007. 40" x 60"

By Manuel Alvarez Lezama

Although Puerto Rico has had excellent photographers beginning in the 50’s with Jack Delano, and afterwards with internationally-acclaimed artists of the stature of Héctor Méndez Caratini, Víctor Vázquez, Jochy Melero, Johnny Betancourt, Néstor Millan, Juan Sánchez, Aixa Requena, Teo Freytes, Guy Paizy, and Rafi Claudio, just to name a few, it is not until the 90’s that a groundbreaking generation - la Generacion del 90 or Los Novisimos - that a different and more provocative group of Puerto Rican photographers begin letting the world know that we are not only in the same aesthetic / ethic wave lengths  but that there are a number of photographers from this small island in the Caribbean with interesting / robust / challenging discourses. Among them one finds artists of the caliber of Allora & Calzadilla, Carlo Ignacio G. Lang, Tristán Reyes, Cacheila Soto, Jacqueline Cooper and, of course, Jason Mena.

Mena, who is one of the youngest members of la Generacion del 90 - the generation that includes Allora & Calzadilla, Chemi Rosado Seijo, Carlos Rivera Villafañe, Ada Bobonis, Ramón Berrios, Annex Burgos, Aaron Salabarrías, Rabindranat Díaz and René Pérez (”Calle l3″), is an extremely talented and resourceful artist who during the past 10 years has experimented in the fields of painting, sculpture and other forms of three-dimensional art, and conceptual art. However, Mena has slowly but steadily found his true inner voice as a daring and original photographer whose main concerns have been 1.) The relationships / dialogues between architectural spaces - abandoned or in full use - the individual - both, from an existentialist point of view and from a spatial one, and 2.) his honest interest for social justice and his intelligent criticism of the blatant lies of capitalism / consumerism and the false expectations they create in our poor or middle class people.

Mena’s first important moment as a photographer came three years ago when he presented a series of self-portraits -Expanded Proportions 2005 - that made it clear he was a dedicated and consequent artist. In these self-portraits, made with the use of a scanner, he captured himself - his face - dramatically disfigured, revealing influences of Pablo Picasso’s cubism and Francis Bacon’s existentialist expressionism. Although created to be deciphered and understood by the public, these self-portraits also contained a very particular sense of humor - a sense of rebellious / chilling humor that would later be present in many of his most important compositions.

Jason Mena. Expanded Proportions, 2005.(LEXMARK Scanner) 24" x 33"

As a student in the School of Plastic Arts of Puerto Rico, but especially after he graduated, Mena could be best described as a serious and focused young man. And during the last few years he has become a voracious reader - from History of Art to World History in general, politics, cinema, aesthetics and philosophy in general - something which has made him grow tremendously. This preoccupation with his intellectual growth has helped him immensely as an artist, and is clearly present in his latest photographs - compositions that can best be described as “chapters” of an intense personal voyage where dreamlike / surrealistic and very realistic elements (the realities of our different Third Worlds) intertwine and are presented with equal passion.

There is a general consensus among photography experts that have seen Mena’s work that, so far, his most outstanding photographs are the ones where he uses empty private structures (historical houses, houses that have become museums - such as Casa Cautiño in Guayama, Puerto Rico) or abandoned spaces (rundown houses - the patios or the different rooms - before they are torn down) and constructs what could be read as an existentialist snapshot or a magnificently eerie but subtle story (a crime? a suicide? an attack of anxiety or hysteria?).

For architect Luis Gutiérrez, Puerto Rico’s most important / serious collector of photographs, who owns several works by Mena, this young artist  - Mena is 33 years old - embodies the professionalism and liberties that define Puerto Rico’s new photographers. Committed, with something relevant to say, they want us to share their dimensions / universes. “They are in tune with the technology, the digital world, and they possess a truly original way of seeing what surrounds all of us,” Gutiérrez expressed. And I must add: they have the courage to invent - as Mena does with his beautiful but enigmatic rooms, where we always “discover” / “speculate,” with the extremities of a mysterious body laying on the floor, mostly hidden, all we can see are those inert legs and feet - a story that can either remind us of the great scenes from The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) or from Julio Cortázar’s short story La casa tomada.

In these large-format photographs Mena is not afraid to challenge us in every way possible. And this is obvious not only in the quality of the photographs - composition, use of colors and lights - but in the possible readings of each piece. The titles are themselves phenomenal: There is Nothing That a Man Fears Most Than The Unknown (2006), I Am Less Confused, I Begin To See But Many Problems Remain (2006), What Can Be Said At All Can Be Said Clearly And What We Cannot Talk About We Must Pass Over In Silence (2006), The Universe That We Can See Represents The Broken, Shattered Remnants Of A Greater Simplicity (2005), Hope, as a Pillow, Lies Under Your Head With Lasting Effect (2008). Mena wants us to become co-authors of each photograph / story.

Most recently, Mena has been working with Puerto Rican and Latin American urban landscapes -digitally intervened architecturally and socio-politically rich photographs where he appropriates commercial spaces such as urban billboards, advertising space on buses, bus-shelters, public telephone advertising space, banners outside a store or bar, etc., digitally placing powerful and controversial socio-political and / or existentialist messages (usually one-liners, like the ones placed by religious groups that tell us: “Even if everything is going wrong, GOD loves you!”) which  force viewers to question social values and political structures, and, above all, the meaning of Life. 

According to Mena, who has been invited twice to Photo Miami, three times to CIRCA (Puerto Rico) and once to ARTEAMERICAS (with a new invitation for this year in a curated show by Milagros Bello titled “Trends: Aspects of Latin American Art”), the only way for an artist to communicate something important to the masses is by appropriating - physically or digitally - public commercial spaces. “It is this visual shock what will make people react, create a socio-economic or ecological consciousness.”

There is no question that in a very short time Jason Mena has become a fascinating and, yes, controversial chronicler of certain realities from the schizophrenias lived in Puerto Rico - the oldest colony of the world, a country that wants to believe that it belongs to the capitalist banquet, but which is really a Third World - and shared by many around this blue planet we call Earth. Jason Mena is no longer a promise, but a robust artist with important things to say.  

Manuel Alvarez Lezama:  Professor, University of Puerto Rico. Art Critic - Member of AICA.