Run horse run

Without the steeds’ thrust, noble beasts domesticated for work, war and entertainment, the old world orders, the expansion of their territories and the appropriation of their wealth would not be understood.

Countless romances and novels, haughty monuments and majestic paintings kept the memory of that time when history was a matter of daring horsemen and challenging horses.

The machinist industry and motorized transport displaced the horse from its privileged place. In the equestrian sculpture, the circus, the carousel or the hippodrome, those who were protagonists of conquests, revolutions and trips to the promised land still show off their verve.

Although marginalized by the economy of large cities, the steed has not stopped riding in the collective imagination. In feuilletons, comic books, the cinematograph and the popular lyric, the legend of the centaurs returns without ceasing.

The animal that devours distances and does not shy away from obstacles still embodies the dream of getting away and the mystery of omens. This exhibition refers to the mythological force of the steed, although it only addresses some of its forays across the vast plain of images.

Based on a selection of works with equine motifs belonging to Fundación Televisa's photographic collections, the horse is recognized and interrogated as a study model, artistic representation and witness to history.

Authors from different places and times share their views on the quadruped that connected photography with the praxinoscope, the epic with the cinema and the chronicle with the fable.

This approach to the horse both as inspiration and as an extra invites us to reflect on the apparent fixity of photography, a recording medium that was an accomplice of modern optical illusions and stays the building material of our historical memory.

These images deal with major themes of time and its traces, and the relationship between nature and culture. With them, we assume the encounter of the horse with photography as a manifestation of different historical processes and cultures, and not only as an iconographic aspect.

A trotting horse or a running man have been, since chronophotography opened a window into transience more than a century ago, small planets and paths in a universe in which everything moves: light, matter, the hardest stone, the most transparent air.

The photographic studios of movement collaborated in the birth of a projector device that took advantage of a characteristic of our fallible eyes —the persistence of images on the retina— to entertain while deceiving.

By the time photographers Edward Curtis and Solomon Butcher lived and worked, the natives had already been reduced to living on reservations. Curtis was the author of the most ambitious recording project known about the faces and customs of the American Natives.

Butcher, a portraitist of the inhabitants of a single county, demonstrated the possibilities of photography as microhistory. In the works of these nineteenth-century documentary makers, the horse is a constant presence.

The armed movement that cost the lives of a million Mexicans and was the basis of a complex political system, as popular as it was undemocratic, was fought with carbines, machine guns, trains, horses, and images.

The battles and cavalcades had the epic resonance provided by popular poetry, photography, cinema and the plastic arts. The Revolution was the result of its large and small events, likewise, it was a story composed of the collective imagination.

It would be convenient to put order to the revolutionary horse riding, to follow the trail of those filmed and photographed horses that went from the war to the commemoration. Iconography in which horses are protagonists of triumphal entries, brawls, publicity stunts and rodeos.

Equestrian sculpture and photography share an ambition for immortality. The riders and horses that emerged from the molten metal have a cavalcade of resistance ahead. The city needs these anachronistic figures to feel that not everything changes.

Symbols of a power that no longer commands or frightens, or of a saga that resists oblivion, the equestrian sculptures testify to the life that runs along boulevards and public squares. Although the times change, the waking centaurs, mute, undaunted, maintain their poise.

The photographic memory of the world documents, directly or tangentially, the gradual decline of the empire of the horse. Cities became metropolises, towns became cities, and horse-drawn transportation was unable to compete with the new speed.

At the opposite end of the hand that advances without seeing, the photographers meet again with the tiresome trot of those who, in more heroic times, helped their colleagues carry their belongings and succeed in their expeditions.

The noble quadrupeds, relaxed, as without an owner, are willing to get together, as they were before for adventure. With no more feat than the work routine, these horses are no longer in a hurry.

Those who live with them on a daily basis know, however, that in the light of a certain hour, in an untimely way, their company becomes the visitation of an immemorial dream. What are the crouching gypsy and the steed that Koudelka portrayed on a road in Romania talking about?

The weather, love, bad pay, the distance that still remains to be covered are matters to be discussed among companions who trust each other and share the goods of the earth. The friendship that unites the species they represent is as old as wine and the zodiac.

The equestrian sculptures are for the exclusive use of heroes and emperors, but let no one try to deny the right that all of us, mortals not exempt from feats, have to the epic of horses.

This seems to be the main statement of the portraits in which children and adults pose as riders of steeds that do not flinch, imitations made with cardboard, paint and sticks. On the back of the horse-objects dreams of future and impossible horseback riding come true.

"Circle of animals" is the meaning of the word zodiac, the celestial dance that we have questioned since ancient times as a messenger of destiny. An equally round track is the one that gave its name to that show of a thousand and one wonders that is the circus.

Circular is also the orifice that we call pinhole: the original eye of the lucid and obscura cameras. Through all these circles, both mythological and earthly, the horses and their replicas have not stopped running.