REKNEAD, ACCELERATE, RETRACE, RETURN...

FROM LINEAR TIME TO KNEADED TIME

“I have gone back to work with a certain regularity, but I make very slow progress. I spend hours on a group of sentences that I shall completely rewrite the next day.”

(From André Gide’s journal, 1904)

Here is a chapter, in which I try to bring into focus all dimensions in my work related to the theme of time.

For years I have followed a certain consequentiality of time. Things have developed in a linear fashion, uninterrupted and uniformly.

Then, at a certain point, something changed. The order was inverted, superimposed, amalgamated, accelerated and taken up in a variety of sequences.

It is thus not just a linear time that proceeds inexorably from left to right, but also a time that goes back on itself, retraces its tracks, is kneaded, shortens durations and occasionally annuls itself.

This is the definition of time that I gave in my glossary:
Dimension constituted by the coexistence of two perceptions: linear and cyclical. By uninterrupted time which determines the existence one day after another to the repetitive one fixed by the rituality of doing. It is inside this entity that the extension of life unfolds through the concretisation of the substance-colour.
From the cyclical nature of the bowl, which rhythmically always returns to red, to the continuum of the consequential process of one colour after the other in the ‘Diaries’, to the fixedness of a gesture always repeated on the same place in the ‘Infinite Painting’, to the process of the formation of the ‘Sedimentations’, which on the one had follows a linear and potentially infinite path and on the other a circular rhythm which always picks up from the same place – each canvas starts with red – and returns cyclically back to itself.
However, things are never so unequivocal, precise and defined. Sometimes they escape a clear simple system and thus new ways of perceiving and representing arise, making the questions increasingly complex.
As well as talking about the central points of my work in this chapter, I also touch on the marginal ones, those moments in which other ways of perceiving time are established. From moving forward undauntedly, carrying on in all conditions, to stopping and suspending when everything is determined by moments of interruption and discontinuity.

(Written in 2015. Modified in 2022)