Taking a distance, arriving at the essence, freeing the containers

 
‘The Mould Our Deeds Leave
Every part of nature teaches that the passing away of one life is the making room for another.’

(from Henry David Thoreau’s journals, 24 October 1837)

 
Starting from nothing and subsequently cordoning this nothing off before coming to define it as an empty space, only for it to then be gradually filled with traces of its own existence. Subsequently going through a necessary process of synthesis to reduce the space and compress time before, finally, removing the content. In order for something to happen again it is necessary to erase the traces, letting go of the surplus, creating a neutral space again, leaving room for oneself and for others so they can fit inside and insert themselves with their own imagination. Paradoxically, I would like to say that what is important, what has meaning is more the act of cataloguing, which has kept alive the action more than blocking everything in a rigid and immobilised form. Stripping the archive and disbanding what was in it, are powerful expressions that help me to free my mind to say that the process of archiving is more important than the archive per se.
I would now like to try to push myself towards a paradox or perhaps more than anything towards a provocation. Who knows? Perhaps this slow process that I have simplified and synthesised over the years, taking out more and more, could even lead me in a distant future to stop carrying out my painterly gesture. Maybe everything could be concentrated, ensuring that only the substance of the ‘Bowl’ is generated without the colour being kept and accumulated on any surfaces. There would thus be no more need to produce, nothing to archive, but only the thought that lives in an open and fluid process that would flow into a small glass container measuring 30 x 30 x 30 cm, which collects the ‘Sludge’, or rather the residue of a process.
All of this would doubtlessly be unimaginable if it weren’t for those two passages I mentioned, on the one hand that of taking a distance from oneself, from one’s space, to look at oneself from outside and try to understand what has been done and on the other that of arriving at the essence of things through a synthesis, a compression, a simplification.
 
Below I talk about some of the works that deal with these passages of detachment and synthesis to finally arrive at the emptying:
 
TAKING A DISTANCE
A schematic, synthesised view of the archive from the outside, a form of detachment, is made concrete in the work ‘Shrunken Gestureplace’. It is the shrinking of the ‘Gestureplace’, the space built to represent, contain and make the act of painting happen. Here it has been made teeny tiny to be embraced and grasped. The box-space that contains it is the reproduction on a 1:10 scale of the ground floor of my studio where I work with the colour substance.
 
ARRIVING AT THE ESSENCE
There is a chapter in the ‘Self-Portrait’ part with the title ‘Compressing’. In it, I have dealt with the question of compression in great detail on the one hand regarding the relationship between making and the substance in the ‘Gestureplace’ and on the other regarding the reasoning that runs alongside the process in the ‘Mindsite’. I have described how, and through which works I have arrived at this condensation.
However, there are other works that over the years have considered this inclination to conciseness. For example, ‘Synthesis’, the work which schematises the space and the objects which over the years have defined what is fundamental in my painting in a few essential elements, or ‘Synthesisplan’, the transposition on a single orthogonal surface of all the single parts, kept separate, which are needed to reconstitute the ‘Shrunken Gestureplace’. It is an elimination, a rewinding to go back to the moment in which things were not yet formed.
 
FREEING THE CONTAINERS
The ‘Emptying’ is the reproduction to scale of the skeleton of the ‘Gestureplace’ with all the painting part it contains taken out. It consists of the reproduction of three ‘Archivers’: the ‘Diary-theque’, the ‘Infinite Painting’ and the ‘Sedimentary’ emptied of their works, with the addition of a ‘Sedimentation’ measuring 60 x 50 cm hanging at the centre of the ‘Sedimentary’ wall.
If the maximum compression of the artist’s act is concentrated in a single work, the ‘Gestureplace’, here, inside the ‘Emptying’, this condensation is reproduced stripped down, reduced to the bones, as if it were the skeletal representation of a thought. On the one hand, the meaning of a lack, a distancing, a regression which leads to a purged, ghostly vision, and on the other an empty space, a container that anybody could potentially fill ideally with the stratification of their own existence. The structure is there like a sort of metaphorical place that potentially could always be refilled.
 
 
 
(Text written in 2022)