Grafías y ecuaciones
When does a letter turn into a figure, a scribble into a sign, a line into a signifier, an image into a word, a poem into a drawing, a political slogan into an assertion of the senses? When, at which particular time, does our perception dislocate to enter a turbulence zone where signs and figures intertwine? Grafías y ecuaciones explores the works of artists who have traveled that turbulence zone where traditional boundaries between word and image no longer exist: they are not relevant any more.
Avant-garde created an experimental field giving rise to new signs that can no longer be considered linguistic signs or visual figures. They are more than that: this has to do with building artifacts where the difference between a linguistic sign and a visual image collapses, and the space (page or canvas) starts to display correspondences that project in multiple directions. They are spellings that sometimes seem to create a word but at the same time show us their figurative nature; they are signs that suggest equivalences –equations– without providing unique meanings. This exhibition encourages us to inquire about Meaning and, at the same time, to explore the senses.
This is about spellings and also equations, term that invokes mathematics, but in particular, this is about how imagination works. Because, whereas imagination operates through similarities and analogies, these are destroyed, questioned, increased or celebrated when exhibited pieces are seen. Juan Pablo Renzi’s sketches on El jinete azul (the blue horseman), Juan Carlos Romero’s notes on Trigo-carne-yerba mate (wheat, meat, yerba mate) and the lessons in Osvaldo Romberg’s Historia del Arte (art history) series show how equivalences work in any graphic activity, from scales for a future project to a Giorgione or a Rembrandt. Whereas in Renzi, Romero or Romberg’s examples there is a structural translation, most works from Grafías y ecuaciones threaten the equivalence systems: imagination travels through similarity to come across difference, irreducible things or nonsense around the corner. Sometimes works can be converted into another system (Leandro Katz, Eduardo Kac), others resist any kind of decoding (Mirtha Dermisache, León Ferrari, Clemente Padín, Mira Schendel) and, finally, some allow for correspondences that end up being ridiculous or parodic (Horacio Zabala, Guillermo Kuitca, Artur Barrio.) All of them, however, have the same ending: there is always an illegible remainder that brings us back to the senses. In that space there wait those other works that permit no equivalence and place –side by side– entities so heterogeneous that, if we attempt any decoding operation, we end up in delusion: Benedit using lines from Oliverio Girondo’s poem called Campo nuestro (our field), some pieces by Brusckly, others by Guillermo Deisler and Carlos Zerpa. This last group’s preferred procedure is the collage, a traditional technique from the experimental Avant-garde.
This is not, however, a simple matter of making tentative taxonomies in order to proceed through this unclassifiable collection of documents. What do these works do with spellings and equations in that experimental field? Brazilian artist Paulo Bruscky uses unconventional writings, for example, a cardiogram, but their equivalences are not longer those of medical knowledge but those from poetry and love.
Jorge Caraballo displays a set of analogies of the word “peace” that range from the dove to a cigarette pack to a crossed text and a negation (“and nothing else”): as if there were no possible equivalent of peace in everyday reality. In one of his compositions, Sigfredo Chacón writes the word “Fragile” that no longer refers to contents or goods but to meaning itself that renders artifacts exhibited in Grafías y ecuaciones so special. Leandro Katz plays with the letter “Ñ” —not because of its idiomatic uniqueness but because of its visual form— displayed in a colorful and geometrical way (in another series, Katz creates a lunar alphabet in order to construct sentences and phrases.) Eduardo Kac, in Lianas, writes vertical lines “o tempo há que ser / o nada sem texto / sem fim ou começo / suspenso no vento”, only to cross them out and makes them look like a liana calligram: unlike Apollinaire, who left the letters in his rain calligram intact, Kac hides them under lianas, he tangles them up and confuses them. Emilio Chapela, with a phrase from Chomsky or a koan, resorts to automatic equivalences from the computer to make an intervention that creates visual or chromatic figures that favor the sensory dimension. Others, such as Mirtha Dermisache or León Ferrari, take writing to a dead end, to a maze of metaphysical, political or plastic strokes.
Apart from being a display of signs, the experimental field is also a material space that provides more meanings. The sign is drawing, writing, stroke, font and, at the same time, space, support, matter. “It is not poetry / it is a piece of paper” reads a work by Jaime Higa. In some cases, as in Jacques Bedel’s, it leads us to some practices that perhaps we never do (such as reading the Torah in a ceremony) but that we experience when we tour the hall in a sort of aesthetic contemplation mixed with religious introspection. That is why these works have to be seen as if we were in an office, with the head down and in reading position. While we concentrate on these signs, once again the turbulence zone overtakes: we need to raise our heads to contemplate (or read) the images hanging on the wall.
Thus, we find Time as Activity, Los Angeles, by David Lamelas, where equations lead into the purest contingency: those of a digital time record determined by the image capture.
Come in, then, to the office of graphic wonders where writing and drawing become confused and all we need to do is to open ourselves to meaning and senses.
Gonzalo Aguilar