"Declaration of love to Lenin." Juana Dolores Romero Casanova at the Virreina Centre de la Imatge

This exhibition presents, for the first time in a museum, the work of Juana Dolores Romero Casanova (El Prat de Llobregat, 1992). The artist reactivates the revolutionary and dissident potential of love, a political category that cultural history has associated with bourgeois sentimentality and which today is experiencing a new confinement through imaginaries fostered by the middle classes.

Before the "common" was transformed into a political acronym, long before, in the mid-nineties, the band Pulp elevated the song Common People to the level of a proud yet parodic anthem of the proletariat, a group of intellectuals expelled from the French Communist Party in 1950-including Maurice Blanchot, Dionys Mascolo, Robert Antelme, Edgar Morin, and Marguerite Duras, the latter accused of being "nymphomaniac, arrogant, and of loose morals," according to a report by the Seine Federation-shifted the question of what it means to be a communist to the inquiry of how a community is built.

Juana Dolores Romero Casanova (El Prat de Llobregat, 1992) continues this decentering through different methods and another ideological subjectivity. Thus, in Declaration of Love to Lenin-her first exhibition for a museum-she interrogates a political category such as love, which was culturally associated with bourgeois sentimentality and now seems to be experiencing another confinement within the vocabularies of the middle classes.

In this sense, just as Peter Weiss discussed in Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (1975) [The Aesthetics of Resistance], regarding the painting by Robert Koehler entitled The Strike (1886), if both oppressors and the oppressed are moved in the same way by a work of art, Juana Dolores answers no, and furthermore proposes a truly suggestive hypothesis: to interrupt the de-ideologizing machinery that capitalism imposes in the face of any revolutionary impulse, it is necessary to historicize the codes and systems of love, the much-worn "evaporation of the historical subject," and even the right to resentment.

Referring to Lenin-even perhaps reading him-may seem an untimely act today, because to the sensibility of these times, he himself and the revolution of which he was one of the main protagonists belong to a nonexistent past, which is the way we treat the past when we want to declare it dead. But both the poetic production and dramaturgy of Juana Dolores are attempts to recover the disruptive uses of insolence, to reconnect it with its most dissident popular uses, to extract it from flasks and instant karma. The omnivorous conservative wave, as well as the new imperial powers, have understood the value of irreverence better than capitalism itself. Meanwhile, the middle class emotivity focuses on melting ideology's tensions away with hashtags, achieving that disobedience appears to be a virtuous branch of bureaucracy.

An insolence with transformative will, as is the case with Juana Dolores's work, which builds structures for transgression instead of simply exhibiting egocentrism, can only oppose the prosopopoeia of exemplary attitudes. This would most likely be the editorial line for a program seeking to recharge the revolutionary impetus of shamelessness: to dissociate it from those images that only recreate it during a few decisive moments, to strip it of therapeutic or reparative ends, to use it to understand Marx's well-known clarification: it is not manners nor refinement that make the gentleman, but the ownership of the horse.