…but the moon that night, without failing to show how everything was —the tiny trickle of spring water, the cherry petals gilding towards the earth one-by-one and two-by-two through the still air, the yellow of the Japanese Rose —bestowed upon the obscure profiles of all the images emanated from that magical lantern, giving the impression of a surreal world momentarily scratched into the winds, like a mirage on the brink of vanishing…
Months ago, amongst the scrapbook clippings I haphazardly save in my studio, I found a worn out, long forgotten postcard with an image of the Bust of Plato. I remember having seen it before, possibly in some philosophy handbook or perhaps in the Louvre where it’s on display. This image of the Greek philosopher consequently, began appearing in my mind over and over again, vanishing and returning, but always in some indistinct fashion. The anxiety that this phantom ended up producing forced me to once again seek out the image that months before I had stumbled upon randomly. To my surprise, the reproduction’s imprecision, apart from minute details such as the framing and coloring which are somewhat different, was very similar to the image floating in my mind. This, perhaps is a possible reply to such a playful enigma, I believe that which comes to mind is a perfect coalescence of the three experiences I was able to have, in each moment respectively, before the Bust of Plato and its two reproductions. This fact, banal as it may be, is perhaps the rudimentary seed of this exposition.
This event and the few notes that I had in my sketchbook beckoned me to re-read some Plato’s works, especially the one where he describes the Allegory of the Cave (The Republic, Book VII), the one that has been subjected to countless interpretations. No allegory, no myth is in vain; and as such, one can freely read it as poetry. How many things and how many causes today are still grounded in allegory and myth? Is shadow the origin of painting? Why is the painting of the Bust of Plato entitled Real?
If the bust of Plato on display in the Louvre with its broken nose is always already ghostly, and which is in fact already a reproduction, so to speak, equivalent to a modern photographic reproduction of Plato the individual, what degree of reality will the Plato I paint from memory centuries later have? In the cave where we watch the shadows pass, how many superimposed veils can there be? Each reproduction, every double thins out the ghost, the chimera of the original, of the real, of the starting point. Are these ideas then, that go on diluting themselves, that we make use of mechanically, the same ones that convention has imposed upon us?
I believe that as the ghosts and shadows are thinned out, painting, Art, should make up for them by applying itself with a density even more compact, more diamond-like. In my case, painting is denial and erasure. The void’s naked seductress is the starting point that interests me. Tristan Corbiere once said: “One must paint only what has never been seen, what has not yet been seen.”
This new exposition, entitled Eclipse, continues to lurk about the “not yet been seen.” Perhaps it is only about what the memory paints, what it keeps on painting, erasing… augmenting and correcting ad infinitum, because images move; they never allow themselves to be portrayed out right. Everything is in a before or an after, or in that which lies behind the canvas of the painting. What happens in the here and now is an eternal process of emergence and vanishing. Painting is the on-going endeavor to disconnect the images from the reality they are supposed to represent. What interests me is how to present these images, and at the same time how to articulate them, or construct them. An image is always at least once removed, always a double, a mask for the thing we only perceive via the image, without it, it would not be visible. The ghost is the space of the image, the representation, the theater where this event is possible.
The act of representing does not guarantee any certainty about the represented; rather it only accentuates doubts and uncertainties. No one wants to see it like this since the fact is, it is more uncomfortable, more disturbing. Sight does not exorcise phantoms nor dispel doubts, but rather multiplies them. To paint is to transform inert material into fiction, illusion. Painting and the memory are Siamese twins. They both strive to recover the image like a seducing dream and not as any assertion of reality.
Nowadays, amongst this withering emaciation of vacant images and these hollow words that attempt to find excuses for them, we all believe to be sure in our perception of reality, to appropriate it with more and more precision, hunting down its double in that which is the paradise of the gullible, the so-called virtual reality. Reality (???) moves so quickly that it appears to be more still than ever. I paint in search of the delicate balance of “the moment before,” some non-state, some less-than-subtle space-time full of possibilities.
Since the first few years of the 80s I have been giving my expositions a title. In this case the title of the exposition Eclipse comes from a Clement Rosset lecture where upon remarking on the “insignificance of the real” he makes use of the “eclipse” and cites a passage from Fontenelle: “I am very surprised, said the marchioness, that there is such little mystery in eclipses…” Rosset continues:
In short, what have we learned about the world by observing the regularity of eclipses? Nothing, save that a series of events having all probability of appearing disorderly, happen, without any reason, yet with regularity.
One could learn a lot about humanity by counting the number of farts to establish some statistic, just like Molloy does: “…Oh come on now, I’m just a little fart-man; I hadn’t had to have spoken of it. It is extraordinary how mathematics helps you know yourself.”
With the title of each exhibit I encourage the spectator to look at it as yet another piece of the entire exposition in which the paintings may be related to one another as parts of an even wider discourse, while simultaneously maintaining the autonomous independence that each one enjoys as an individual element of the exhibit itself. The title of a painting or an exposition, however masterfully crafted, is never truly descriptive nor explains anything; rather it serves as a decoy, sometimes paradoxical, sometimes in such an extremely ironic fashion that it acts as a counterpoint, eluding direct readings and half-witted visions.
I choose the images that appear in my paintings impulsively. On the whole, I am inclined to make use of that which seems to me most irrelevant, least attractive and most remote from my tastes and those plastic solutions that can be so easily employed. Accordingly, I shun all types of cheap and easy effects. The more distant and mute the image is that reveals itself to me, the more suitable the adventure seems. Once selected, the image passes through an ice vault, through some lengthy repose, through some ill-defined space only to be nearly forgotten. If while trying to remember it, I discover that it begins to lose itself in the opaque fog of memory’s imprecision, it is here when I feel it is most propitious to take it up again, to begin shaping the image. What I finally find attractive about the images is that point of silent obsolescence they attain, their uselessness, their meager capacity to illustrate the world as one supposes they should.
The images’ expiration date is shorter and shorter each time. They no longer even have the capacity to tell anything of themselves; yet, illusory or deluded, we believe they do. These lifeless images arrive on the canvas in a neutral jumble. Thanks to the act of painting, the image may be able to reclaim a certain power of representation, the return to a life void of stagnation and above all, opulent—potent, due to its ability to astonish by reappearing in an ambiguous space where all codified boundaries between fiction and reality are elastic and capricious. With all of this and more I strive to make all that which seems strange, normal; and all that which seems normal, strange.
My work has no penchant for the purely gestural—is it analytical? In part, yes, considering the paradox. Of course, there are absolutely no pretensions of “style.” For me, “style” is an apt tool to use when the occasion demands it, hence the gesture; whenever I have used it, it has always been a simulation, I have always been pretending; yet, its purpose has always been instrumental. What to mean by all of this? It is easier to paint it than it is to tell it. Nevertheless, in the face of predictable failure, I’ll take my chances by attempting to do the aforementioned.
The invention of photography, and even the virtual imagery of today, is a consequence of Alberti’s concept, of the rules of a perspectiva artificialis which, for the first time in Occidental culture, has managed to mathematize the domain of the senses, and particularly the way in which we view the world — even to the point of erecting this vision in a clear and intelligible paradigm, in a pure reflection of the intellect. This clear and distinct vision has therefore been sentenced to carry out the execution of the vague, the indistinct and the ghostly as perpetrators of confused thought, ungrounded concepts, and that if, in rare occasions they continue constituting aesthetic categories, they will in no case be given access to the gaze’s authority which distinguishes, which looks through — the Latin perspicere, from where we get the word “perspective” and from where it draws its power — that shrewd, sharp lens that isolates, allocates and analyzes. It is quite the contrary if, before a fiction myopically envisioned to be stable, I act. That is to say, take the visibility of the thing itself to its limit.
Let’s imagine a character part scientist, part wizard who dons a star-studded pointy-hat, and who from his laboratory tower gazes at the stars through a microscope while simultaneously peering at fly through a telescope. Now let’s imagine that this is one of my drawings from the 90s in which a painted text reads, (honoring Marcel Broodthaers): “Reality is the discovery between two fictions.”
By 1982 I had already said:
I find myself caught in a dialectic between two realities: one inside the canvas (codified as illusion) and the other outside the canvas (codified as reality). The latter is the reality we see and experience through the senses. However, this reality can also be seen as an image whereas the reality inside the canvas as something else. Both images are metaphysically unavoidable, just as the illusions and concepts are. We need our reason and our senses to interpret both. I consider both realities, therefore, a continuum: the reality within the canvas is just as illusory as the reality outside it”
(…)
Two realities, two fictions, and a canvas in the middle. Perception is the ebb and flow between the two.
(…)
Everything is a fluid continuum, an incessant metamorphosis. My graphic space, which is an extension of me, is therefore continuously composing and annihilating itself.
To make ironic, to cool, to dislocate, to mark distances, this is the field where we toil. The entire process of “revealing the concealed/concealing the revealed” is the perfect tool for the objectives outlined heretofore. I remember a piece of mine from 1991 in which one can read from a white musical score a text, also painted in white, which says: Half of everything is secret and the other half is hidden. One should read this manifesto as an account of some of the strategies that propel my work, and which are made visible in the final result offered to the spectator.
The work itself already demands of the one who observes it, a certain selective acuity. All these types of strategies tend to explode the standards of the conjuring fetishist to which we are all subjected; I am speaking of the conventionally assumed, “it is happening, I see it,” the news / the imposed image that is pushed and peddled as truth, as reality. It is an absurd conviction that everything is visible and transparent, that technology’s interface and electronic crackling reproduces a reality even more perfect and visible than the already reproduced reality. Today we live in the grand moment of retinal ecstasy, of pervasive amnesia, of pure and absolute retinal impressionism.
To make these compositions of construction and demolition a swift, but concentrated execution is imperative. Yet this only marks the thresholds, the precision and the economy of methods, the work leading up to it all, however, is slow and laborious. Paradoxically it is the whole process of erasure and cleansing that yields the most fruitful results. I am indifferent to the visual satisfaction a painting might stir in me, I have a proclivity to the strange; I am more at ease when the result is, in principle, bittersweet.
It is nice when the painting simply happens; when it leaves me one the sidelines, it’s a good sign. Yet I prefer that it contains something of the undesirable, the unexpected, that it carries some volatile heritage. As of late, I have noticed that so much time slips away before I am able to recognize a painting; I suppose for the painting, the feeling is mutual. Someone once told me that I am actually much more like a peculiar breaker of wild creatures whose job consists of bringing together my beastly-hoard, pissing them all off, then opening the cage, and tempting them to come out and play. I suppose that is one way of looking at it.
This exposition, Eclipse, like all the others before it, has been arranged to be viewed in a predetermined space, more specifically, the A. Machón gallery in Madrid. Whether or not each individual painting can be viewed as autonomous, when put in relation to all the others it encourages a more prolific vision and a more complex reading. Yet at the same time, each space within the gallery represents an act of the overall work. Plato’s evanescent and mutilated bust, which I spoke of earlier, is the catalyst for this trajectory. Upon arriving at the end we will meet our beginning and be compelled to retrace the journey (we recommend you view the exposition this way), and arising from the back of the gallery we will stumble upon the piece entitled Wake Up, which, as though it were the other side of same coin, stands with its back turned to Plato’s ghost—Real. The fiction entitled Eclipse is almost entirely constructed in the space between these two paintings.
With respect to the color of the work, it is nothing new. Perhaps you will not remember, many years have passed, but my earliest work (1973-74) moved amongst the same chromatic scales. The theme of color has never really appealed to me; each work begs a specific pallet, and without further complication or fuss I abide. Color works well when it isn’t distracting. I have always been preoccupied with the color/light, light/color relation. What interests me in a work, especially lately, is light. When works are brought to life by removing paint, light is brought to the foreground, and color remains buried; and although almost completely pillaged, it lurks in the liminal, carrying out its task. Sometimes paintings tend to dazzle, and while hunting down this momentary imprecision of light they undergo a transitional period between dream and wakefulness. The pale white oblivion that tarnishes all paintings incites a silence that sifts through time’s holy hushing rumor. These are the plastic elements that sustain every type of narration present in my work. If there is narration, it is the paint that narrates. In this regard, I feel that I am heir to the 20th century’s avant-garde; and it is no consequence, it is an election.
Chema Cobo, 2008.
Translated from Spanish by:
Andrew M. Morrow
