Video projections into different materials & silk screens printed onto cardboard, plaster and plastic bags.
From the world of specters (images) to the world of materials.
Drama: el término proviene del griego δράμα, que significa “hacer” o “actuar”; sin embargo, su significado en español incluye, dentro de sus acepciones, al texto literario cuya intención es la de ser puesto en escena.
During the last two years I have embarked upon a ridiculous action (drama) as a way to reconnect to the process of making art.
In May 2022 I participated in a group exhibition in which I showed works that surrounded my attempts at understanding blindness, mine in particular.
The idea of departure was to create objects -surfaces or supports- by using my own hands, real things, extensive and touchable things, in opposition to the specters that comes with writing or filmmaking, practices that I used to consider less physical, more abstract, more intellectual.
From the beginning I imagined these objects occupying a large space, spreading out in a lateral area, climbing and possessing marked physical qualities, and in my head I gave them, I don’t know why, a sense of antagonistic forces. Those shapeless skeletons, without category and monster in size (obviously I was overreacting, they wouldn’t be that big or that monstrous) opposed me, they fought against me, against my desire, in my head.
In any case, I thought that the center of the works would not be those still unimaginable objects, but rather the difficulties that I would encounter in the process of manipulating them, of constraining them - my little drama: how to become a sculptor-, that therein would lie its true significance. That would be the invisible center that I long to touch (I have already said I was blind). For this reason, when I began to write, to document my process, I believed that the exhibition would constitute a kind of closing (opening, I now know) of a very long and intimate performance but also the material formulation of a longed-for statement on how to work, a way to approach to work that it would include plants and bodies.
It was a time of gathering, of reconquest, of reappropriation. During those months I used to go to bed thinking about substrates but whose edges I couldn’t see really well, things that pushed, that fell vertically (Jean-Luc Nancy with his idea of the atoms falling vertically). I dreamed of secret and lost structures and the possibility of finding them. I gathered trivial, broken materials, like fiberglass, sheets of plaster, fabrics, cardboard. Sourcing them from the world of construction and from my own home, where I found them without a sharp edge or a clear definition. But I immediately treasured them despite the ridicule, the drama. They are abject, domestic, worthless materials. The use of those raw and poor bodies tried to imbue the works with a sense of vulnerability and roughness, of brutality, that was more tactile than visual. There was something around the idea of violence, an excess, a material inscription that I was starting to surround.