Opening and expanding

Here I consider the question of how the archive, both as a work and as a document of the work, can be drawn out of its containers and exhibited physically in the space. I am thinking about how it could be expanded, dilated, giving form to the exhibitions-works that bear a reflection of what it means to place on the outside that which usually remains closed and private inside the box-studio and inside the box-archive. I am thinking about a way of exhibiting that – extracting what is essential from inside the entire body – produces a compendium of all the work.
 
Precisely because the possibility that things can be reorganised and re-read millions of times in different ways is inherit to the nature of the archive, the idea of exhibiting what we are talking about contains within it the possibility of appearing with a different variation each time. Depending on the places, the people involved, the times in which they are created can lead to seeing new conformations and new solutions each time.
 
These thoughts have merged within two works I have been working on for a number of years but which, until today 13 February 2022, have not yet been created: the ‘Ostension’ and the ‘Expansesite’.
In their complementary fashion, these works keep together and talk about all the things necessary to allow the artistic thought and act to progress. On the one hand, the relationship with doing and with the substance in producing colour and spreading it on the surfaces, and on the other ruminating and writing about that practice.
The ‘Ostension’ is the work that exposes the central nucleus of the ‘Archive-Work’ (or rather the ‘Gestureplace’) through a performative act, done by other people.
It is the moment in which all the substance produced during the existence, the time my painting consists of, leaves the archivers and takes space. It is the situation in which all the ‘Sedimentations’ contained in the ‘Sedimentary’, all the ‘Diaries’ contained in the ‘Diary-theque’ and the ‘Infinite Painting’ closed in the case, are extended in the space and open to the gaze of others.
The ‘Expansesite’ is the way in which all the works generated by the archive are organised in the physical space of a room, as if the visions of the brain had left the cranium to make themselves visible. It is the situation in which, for example, the series of ‘Panels’ which contain interpreted information from the archive or photographic works that document the transformation of things over time are exhibited.
It is the moment in which all the thoughts that have been formed alongside the painting transferred into the site-archive go from the digital level to the real one, going on to form a three-dimensional environment that our bodies manage to physically experience.
 
Regarding all this thinking, I have opened a whole chapter with the title ‘Ex-posing Everything’. It can be found here, in ‘Self-Portrait’.
 
 
 
 
(Written in 2022)