WORLD SKETCH 

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof art is incapable of being silent.
Guillaume Désanges

“Bête comme un peintre, dumb as a painter, French proverb dating the 10th century indirectly illustrated the idea of the Romantic genius enlightened by the grace of the inspiration and enfolded by technical excellence in their manual skills. However, artistic practices in our history today seem to have been written against that assertion and with an explicit aim to settle a new paradigm, which understands artistic productions as intellectual constructions.

Artistic productions and exhibition practices in recent decades — especially from the appearance of conceptual movements merged around the ideological crisis of 1968 —confirmed those expectations: the place from which artistic practices are formulated — and their argumentative compensations — has shifted its location, and the artist, now transformed into a producer of meaning, will not be able to move around those new territories without the solid foundation of their discursive framework.

Hence, the artist becomes a provider of intellectual contents, some times a philosopher; others, an ethnographer (H. Foster), but also a psychologist, a researcher of plundering and domination, a culture critic, a discloser of the sedative fascination of the media, an ‘ideological patron’ (W. Benjamin), or a campaigner of the fight for the visibility of the most diverse collectives, neglected by the hegemonic look — feminism, queer activism, postcolonial regime... —, and always an explorer of the provisional nature and instability of the regimes of representation, a recodifier of conventions.

Life as hypertext

Compels us to travel over a wide field of thought criss-cross in every direction.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

The exhibition ‘WORLD SKETCH’ suggests a tour to that ‘office of the nothingness’ that is the visual artist’s studio: the laboratory of thoughts, the conceptual workroom where images germinate and mature, where works take a shape and imbibe with sense.

Attending to the inner workings of the creative process and visualising some dynamics of the work that usually remain hidden and at the margins of the hierarchy imposed by the exhibition system, places us in the core of the most directly processual aspects of the art work. Being witness to the chaining of certain choices, among other probable combinations and crossroads of discarded ways, provides the viewer with the added value of a new experience of the object. Considering that each decision implies a modification in the result, the panoramic view of these potentialities open a whole series of additional perspectives which will enrich the possibilities of reading.

Exhibition displays in recent decades got us fairly acquainted with the new paradigm; the work is now shown as an open area and as a definitive state of no-conclusion, a work in progress that blurs its aesthetic appearance and renounces, for better or worse, the narcissist fantasy of style.

Beyond formalist results of the finished work, present time points to an increasing interest in processual aspects: theoretical assertions, documental records from the most various matter, pure inventories of news and events, statistical charts, collection of images from the media, gathering of objects open to different relational fields, and certain links spreading and multiplying in virtual spaces... a census of completely heterogeneous materials which shape something like new cabinets of curiosities on the working table of the plastic artist.

Breadcrumbs in the forest of signs 

 [...] these are not fragments but active elements and
when they are more and a little older they will begin to fuse of themselves.
James Joyce

Artist’s identity cards are their self-help books, their construction materials store: mnemonic exercises to keep the direction of thoughts. Breadcrumbs in the forest of signs. Throughout their pages they gather possibilities of meaning which they might use in the future. There they combine, without no more authority than the one imposed by the fate of encounters and the vagary of the moment. Reflections on the profession itself, drawings, press clippings, reading notes, narrative miniatures, remembrances from childhood, photographs, painting studies, letter drafts... every kind of item that for some reason or another are thought to be retained or kept, because ‘maybe one day can be useful to me’ (Claude Levi-Strauss), because maybe one day can help to remember something that now is not known to be forgotten. Each work casts lights and shadows, each sign flows into another sign: links of an endless chain where meaning is translating.

The author will take advantage of all these accumulated materials, of all this inventory of possibilities, as an intuitive — and at the same time — deliberate mechanism of intelectual DIY. Therefore, every sketch and ‘clipping’ becomes a tool for thought, a material object transformed into objects for knowledge: models of possible solutions to yet unformulated matters.

‘WORLD SKETCH’ offers the possibility of visiting a melting pot of forms that are present in the artist’s studio. It does so by bringing to the museum a set of jumbled tools and documents which, as if pieces of a puzzle in constant movement, give sustenance and nurture the creations. Everything from sketches, notebooks, outlines waiting their turn or chance. Objects half-forgotten around the studio; folders packed with press clippings, images and other artist’s books — from a set of postcards with artistic images to videos in loop from youtube. Regarding the visual aspect and the exhibition layout, this proposal researches the interstices found between pure documentalism, environment and installation. The exhibition layout stages — above any other consideration — the ambiguous statutes of the ‘sketch’: an entity that walks towards the artwork yet it is still not art… or it might be.”

Ángel Cerviño
Alberto González-Alegre
Curators of the exhibition