Fervor
Fervor
In his search, amid concrete works (for him, a singular raw material), was precisely where he found resistance.
However, after so many other artists before him, how would he compose his form?
His craft, let’s call it that, takes place along a flow of ideas leaving traces of works, a continuous network of digressions that would lead any individual following his progress to the feeling of being in the middle of a story that began some time ago.
So, what is this story?
He narrates it as it happens, a story interwoven with interpolations that subtly cover our reality. Let’s see: two concrete columns with wedges. The latter so broad in its meanings. Personal name, expression, place, thing. The wedge seems to underline the intentions, the balances; of the intrusion, but pertinent intervention. If that were not enough, in this strange body we find the strength of the matter. The presence of unavoidable facts. And, due to not being limited to any of the previous meanings, it expands and turns into an impersonal haven, a space of universal influx. The wedge dug its own space: it resisted.
Here is another work. On the floor, a concrete disk with a wedge. The previous could have served as a clue, but not an answer, as we are here faced with another inflection. Once again (and not because of the concrete), the artist leads us to a flashback. And, if we resist apprehending the reason for this new insertion, we know that he will do it again in the future. Well, let’s not confuse its proximity to the ground with a lack of structural weight. We know its name, its properties, its raison d’être. In this case, it seems to have the role of pointing to a center of convergence, the heart of the matter.
Or would it be too much to assume that we see our own economic situation in it? Unbridled temptation. However, once again, we know that we will not find its real strength in the particular.
In the concrete? In the concrete.
Would this matter be indicative of the specificity of what we are dealing with here?
Would it be an illusion to presume this relationship?
Let us not allow the shadow of this issue to disturb our visit. Continuing: three solid wooden bases burned with liquid bronze. And so, we sound a melody: the sound of bronze in contact with the wooden bases. But it is a melody we no longer hear. We know it wasn’t a gradual, subtle thing. We are left only with its new, unheard-of heights. Its matt tones shine brightly. They seem not to exhaust their means to be subsequently and inevitably replaced. There they remain: resistant.
And what succession of other works will we distinguish here?
In this space full of relative opacity, there would be a moment for material astonishment, such as the following: sandpaper and glass painted from red to earthy hues. The tone is the protagonist (mineral sparkle), for a moment, in rapid pulses: lava red, maroon, burgundy, boiling, burning, until it reaches, intrusively and volcanically, the darkness. And the architecture-wall becomes an abrasive material capable of consuming, ruining, and destroying. Which mitigates baroque excess, sands the roughness, streaks the sentimentalism and inaccuracies….[1] Thus it presents us with the contact space: frictional, convulsive, fervent. For those arriving now: the touchstone we see in contact with the blackness of the automotive paint takes us back to the basic abstract. Are we always formulating trajectories and equations without lapidary clarity? Even if this is precisely the issue that most concerns us?
Looking meticulously among the soft red monochrome tapestries, we find clinging ticks. Undesirable and harmful, they spread quickly, depending on how they cling, moor, with thorns that serve to sow. They seem to have been left as vestiges of a continuous process of friction.
The heat. The convulsion. The moment of difficult contact. Of resistance. The moment when the bronze cools and, in turn, appears once again through the figure of the resistant wood: the unarmed volcano, naked, disassembled. We will recognize it in our surroundings. Its echo, schematic and rational, contentful and insensitive, is made present amid the boiling of its omissive smoke signals.
And what tension-resolution does it bring us?
It is in the second stanza, a new echo, that we reach full power. When we see, once again, the concrete column with the delicate floating line (like a nervous meridional blade) that cuts it. We perceive beyond the strength of those who are and always will be. We understand that the obscure point that allows us to see, this sun situated eternally below the horizon, this blind spot the gaze is unaware of, islet of absence in the heart of vision—that is the aim of the quest and the setting, the stake, of the plot.[2] And that was all.[3]
[1] Jorge Luis Borges, paraphrased from the prologue written by the author for the Emecé Editores edition from 1974. Translated for this volume from the Brazilian edition.
[2] Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come, translated by Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2003), 160.
[3] William Faulkner, “The Sound and the Fury: Appendix Compson: 1699–1945,” in Novels 1926–1929 (New York: Library of America, 2006), 1141.