PRESS RELEASE
From May 8 through June 14, 2013, 11 x 7 Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition “(Hypotheses)” (Hipótesis) by the Argentine artist Horacio Zabala. It was not so long ago –in 2009, to be precise– that Zabala began his series of works entitled (Hipótesis). The “(Hypotheses)” (Hipótesis) are an odd combination of hand-painted monochromatic canvases with objects representing grammatical or mathematical signs executed in industrial fashion; they are, in fact, laser-stencilled objects on wood, with a synthetic glaze, and colored black, through a spray gun. This tension between the hand-made and mechanically guided execution speaks, in reality, for a greater tension which implies, in Zabala’s work, a turn in his poetics. It is the tension arising from the encounter and the juxtaposition of the conceptual with the perceptual. Conceptual art has suffered a setback whenever it has failed to eliminate the dimension of the perceptual. In (Hipótesis), Zabala –who from his earliest days has moved within the orbit of conceptualism– not only includes the perceptual but even gives it preeminence. It is the central element (the monochromes) on which the artist must count, count both in a numeric sense –through mathematical operations– as well as in a discursive sense –through grammatical signs. But it’s a matter of a counting that will always be exceeded by the muteness and the empty appearance of the monochromes by their undaunted presence in the face of any mental appropriation. The mathematical or discursive operations are, definitively, hypotheses that lack demonstration. The conceptual simulacrum of the formula allows no place for any result but rather, for a conjecture, a stumbling, a tremor.
In the art history of the last century, the monochrome was one of the modes in which the conceptual and the perceptual were both taken to the extreme at one and the same time and with equal radicalness. In fact, Jean-François Lyotard chosen Malevich’s monochromes to show “the incommensurability of reality to the concept, which is implicit in the Kantian philosophy of the sublime.” However, the incommensurable, the absolute to which every monochrome aspires is sabotaged by Zabala through two operations: the first consists in placing one monochrome near another monochrome. Each piece, therefore, both is and isn’t a monochrome. The gaze is forced to recognize the pure colors that don’t combine with any other and, at the same time, to enter in relation with other pure monochromes. The pure, without ceasing to be pure, is pushed toward the impure. The other operation is no less perverse: the absolute of the monochrome is relativized through the appearance of the signs of relation, be they mathematical or grammatical. The monochromes’ aspiration to the absolute becomes ridiculous, one step shy of comedy. As Fernando Davis says, “in articulating (causing friction between) signs coming from different domains and codification systems (the monochrome, grammatical signs, mathematical signs), Zabala perverts the very logic of the monochrome, its self-referential condition as a degree zero of painting.” The two modalities move in an opposite direction: while the first emphasizes the limitation of the perceptual, the second lays bare the insufficiency of the conceptual relation. The slogan “to think what is seen” which is an emblem of the course it pursues, requires opening up, with the (Hypotheses), to a dimension that exceeds all thought. You have to look once and then again at these impossible formulae to recognize, at last, that the ensemble leaves us speechless yet also plunged into a certain esthetic elation. An esthetic relation which doesn’t derive from a pure contemplation but rather from the clash of the concept with its archenemy, the perceptual.
Looking and thinking continue to exist in the work of Zabala, yet with a looking that is radically irreducible to any discourse, or any plan. In their ensemble, the “(Hypotheses)” carry on the architectonic impulse of planning (indeed, every work has its preliminary “draft”). But in the simulacrum of the impossible formulae, every pictorial piece is pure painting, pure brush-stroke. There is nothing to think in the face of that visuality stripped of everything. Zabala thus adds another aphorism to “thinking what is seen”: also seeing what can not be thought.
– Gonzalo Aguilar
Horacio Zabala was born in Buenos Aires in 1943. He received a degree in architecture in 1973, though already by the mid-60s he was devoting himself to the other visual arts, as continues to do to the present day. Zabala has continued since then to produce a body of work that is experimentally risky and densely theoretical in its reflections, and linked with conceptual art. In 1967 he had his first show at the Galería Lirolay, and in 1972 he participated in the group show Arte e ideología CAYC al aire libre [Art and Ideology, the CAYC Outdoors] with the work 300 metros de cinta negra para enlutar una plaza pública [300 Meters of Black Ribbon to Dress a Public Square in Mourning]. “Art depends on what is not art,” he writes in the catalog. In the 1970s, he was a part of the Group of Thirteen, and in 1973 he presented Anteproyectos [Drafts] at the CAYC, an exhibition in which he worked with different media and took architectural design into the terrain of fictional and intellectual speculation. Especially notable in this show were his plans for prison architecture, which carried his conceptualism into the realm of the political, forcing the emergence of a mutual relation between thought and action.
Exiled in 1976, Zabala lived for 22 years in Italy, Austria, and Switzerland. Outstanding in this period was his Refugio antiatómico [Atomic Bomb Shelter], in which he continued to create the claustrophobic imaginary constructions that enabled him both to think about catastrophe and to carry out, in his words, “a socio-esthetic operation.” In 1997 he made El arte o el mundo por segunda vez [Art or the World for the Second Time], a work conceived for the Internet, which a year later led to a book published by the National University of Rosario. It is not the only book with theoretical texts that Zabala would write: in 2000, the publishing house Adriana Hidalgo brought out El arte en cuestión. Conversaciones [Art in Question: Conversations], coauthored together with Luis Felipe Noé, and in 2008, the publishing house Laborde released his Marcel Duchamp y los restos del readymade [MD and the Vestiges of the Readymade], republished by Editorial Infinito in 2012. He most recent book is Vademecum para artistas [Vade Mecum for Artists] (Observaciones sobre el arte contemporáneo), published by Asunto Impreso.
Zabala has taken part in countless group shows (the Pamplona Encounters of 1972; Ends of the Earth: Art of the Land to 1974, Museum of Contemporary Art of Los Angeles in 2012; Monocromos [Monochromes] at the Recoleta Cultural Center in Buenos Aires, together with Eduardo Costa and Marcelo Boullosa) and various solo shows, such as those he had at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires in 1998, Fondo Nacional de las Artes in 2002. His most recent individual show was Reiterations at Henrique Faria Fine Arts in New York in 2012. He is currently preparing a retrospective of his works at the National University of February 3rd (UNTREF), curated by Fernando Davis.