"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 associated with bourgeois sentimentalism and which today is experiencing a new confinement due to imaginaries fostered by the middle classes.

Before "the common" became a political acronym, long before, in the mid-nineties, the band Pulp elevated the song Common People to the status 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 a "nymphomaniac, arrogant, and of loose morals," according to the Seine Federation's report-shifted the question of what it means to be a communist to the investigation of how community is constructed.

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

In this regard, just as Peter Weiss pondered in Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (1975) [The Aesthetics of Resistance], with regard to Robert Koehler's painting The Strike (1886), whether both oppressors and oppressed are moved in the same way by a work of art, Juana Dolores responds in the negative, and furthermore puts forth a truly suggestive hypothesis: to interrupt the de-ideologizing machinery imposed by capitalism on every revolutionary impulse, it is necessary to historicize the codes and systems of love, the so often worn "evaporation of the historical subject," and even the right to resentment.

Referring to Lenin-or even perhaps reading him-may today be an untimely act, because for the sensibility of these times he himself, and that revolution of which he was one of the main protagonists, belong to a non-existent past, which is the form given to the past when it is meant to be declared dead. Yet both the poetic production and dramaturgy of Juana Dolores are an attempt to recover the disruptive uses of insolence, to reconnect it with its most dissident popular uses, to extract it from the flask and instant karma. The omnivorous conservative wave, as well as the new imperial powers, have understood the scope of the irreverent better than capitalism itself. Meanwhile, middle class emotionality is dedicated to liquefying ideological tensions through hashtags, making disobedience seem like a virtuous branch of bureaucracy.

An insolence with transformative intent, as is the case with the works of Juana Dolores, that builds structures for transgression instead of showcasing egocentrism, can only oppose the prosopopoeia of exemplary attitudes. This would likely be the editorial line for a program seeking to recharge the revolutionary impetus of shamelessness: to dissociate it from those images that merely recreate it for a few decisive moments, to divest it of therapeutic or reparative purposes, and to use it to understand Marx's famous clarification: it is neither manners nor exquisiteness that make the gentleman, but the ownership of the horse.