"The Unhiding are paintings with additional photographic and video graphic material, the results of taking away layers of paint - painting backwards but still painting nonetheless - from a particular wall. The fact that I cannot take this wall away with me means that I have to make use of another medium to document the process.
I always choose the interior walls of houses because they have been inhabited and they are the guardians of our intimacy; I am not interested, for example, in stripping back layers from a wall on the street. ‘A house that is being renovated is a solitary place, with that air of abandonment which constructions have when they are in the process of being built. The presence of an uninhabited house fluctuates between the absurd and the hyperreal, and, gradually, it begins to acquire such dimension that it becomes an absolutely fantastic element'. [Manolo Figueras, Muros de pintura. El lugar de espera]
What happens in the ‘unhiding' is that when there are many layers of paint to be removed, in order that they become visible it becomes necessary to destroy the layers that precede the others. In the ‘unhiding', the frame or border takes on the function of bearing witness to what the wall was before the layer(s) were removed, especially in the photographs, as I do not show the action of scraping, the process of making.
As in the Merz Collages by Schwitters, the colours that appear in the ‘unhiding' have degraded, washed out and worn out tones. With Schwitters this is due to the nature of the materials that he used. In the ‘unhiding' it is the contact, produced by overlapping, between the different layers of paint. For example, if we have a white wall that was red before, when you take off the top layer of white paint with a palette knife, the white paint becomes mixed with the red underneath, so that the red layer degrades towards a pink tone. Therefore, we cannot recover the paint layers in their original colours, and we are back to the impossibility of returning: but has memory disappeared? No, there is something that stops this from happening and that is the frame. The frame or border is the only area of the painting that remains untouched, and far from being an ornamental addition or a simple edge to the piece where the painter can wash his brushes or test out the colours, it is the fundamental axis of tension in the painting. The frame shapes the painting, and not the other way around; it seems as if the painting were somewhat afraid to reach the edge. In order to uncover the layers of paint, the strata, you have to pierce the surface and rough it down; this is what the pictorial action consists of in this case. The surface is not completely destroyed, it survives only at the edges. This idea of not reaching the edges lends a certain centrifugal character to the process of the ‘unhiding'. Centrifugal because the paint is expelled from the centre, forming a cloud around the picture, as the action takes place, and gradually it falls and settles below the picture, in small heaps, like chalk dust on the bottom edge of a blackboard.
One of the things I was most drawn to the first time I saw Anselm Kiefer's pictures, were the deposits of earth and bits of other materials that had formed on the floor below his work. Ignasi Aballí has several series dedicated to dust, one of them is formed by pictures that he left lying face up in a horizontal position, allowing dust to accumulate for years: ‘Dust is the material of synthesis, a mixture of everything that can be eroded in the world. It is also a terminal material, unpleasant, residual, something that we no longer want'. [Ignasi Aballí, in an interview with Dan Cameron]
In many paintings by A. Rainer - for example, Ubermalung Werkes - there is a great mass of colour that takes up nearly all of the painting; only a small corner is left unpainted. But, does it not struggle to survive there? And what is it that suggests that this is the case? The corner, that small chink that remains untouched, is precisely what makes us think that the picture is expanding, more and more, and that as viewers we find ourselves simply witnessing a moment of this process. In Rothko, however, exactly the opposite occurs: it seems that the painting inhabits an eternal moment and place. Here the great mass of colour does not struggle to dominate the space; it approaches the edges but without touching them and in this way appears to live in the space, enveloping the viewer in a very different phenomenology of waiting to that experienced in Rainer. The moment seems eternal, and the sensation is that Rothko's mass of colours gravitate. My intention in ‘unhiding' is to approach Rothko's idea, where the central mass of colour comes close to the edges but does not fight to go beyond them. In short, the colour pictures resulting from perforating the wall are nothing more than samples of what this was, and so they uncover a moment in the existence of the wall. The idea is to place the viewer in front of this existence, so that he or she can see that that mass of colour has not been chosen, but that it has been an intimate place, uncovered, revealed, or perhaps defiled.
The way I work with photographs and videos is simple. I do not touch the images a posteriori; I simply use both techniques as media that allow me to document an action and its result. In the videos for example, I record in a basic and simple way: single fixed shot and natural light. The fixed shot becomes necessary because the action that it captures does not move to other places; natural light redounds upon the core idea of the series: time, sequencing the image.
To suggest the presence of pictures through their absence was the starting point for ‘unhiding'. In order to accomplish this I made perforations in the form of rectangles or squares, like paintings, in different materials. This idea later led me to work with the walls of houses to look at their layers. Moving the entire wall, taking it away from its place of origin, means also to preserve it and perpetuate it in time. Photography and video, on the other hand, do not allow us to know if the wall still remains standing, and that uncertainty, thinking that the image which we are seeing, whether fixed or moving, could right now be a pile of debris on a vacant site, accentuates its fragile existence. Here I am working on the idea of ruin, but not the idea of great ruin - such as we find, for example, in the etchings of Piranesi who refers to a grandiose past - but the ruin of the anonymous and everyday, of that which Boltanski calls ‘little history'".
Manuel Eirís
Vigo, April 2009