Black Bilis.
– 2020.
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Confinement, 5th day.
In these strange moments of confinement, I can expand a series of drawings that constitute a kind of atlas that I recently started. After a pause of years without drawing, I have been making series of more automatic gestures to tune into other spheres of reality, and others of slow invoice with images that impact me mentally.
The Greek classics spoke of black bile to refer to the field of feelings and psychic states that pass between what was later described as acedia or laziness. Giorgio Agamben trace these stages from scholasticism to modernity in the second chapter of his book Stanzas. The word and the ghost in Western culture. According to him, black bile was considered in medieval times as one of the seven capital sins; later, in the Renaissance, it comes to be considered a state proper to philosophers and artists (remember Dürer’s famous engraving titled Melancholia, in which the mysterious figure of the polyhedron evokes an enigma where strangeness impacts his bolt in our minds, while the Thoughtful figure in the portrait illustrates the introspective state of mind). We find black bile both in Walter Benjamin’s reflections and gaze on the auratic artistic object, and in his suspicion of the world that vanishes behind the weight of progress (it is enough to remember the imposing metaphor that unfolds as a result of the contemplation of the Angelus Novus painting by Paul Klee in his ninth thesis on the concept of history). We can also smell the black bile in Aby Warburg’s imagery of thought that captures, in the apparent heterodox discontinuity of his enneagrams, the guiding threads of a culture that in our contemporaneity seems so distant and that he traces from his Mnemosyne Atlas .
In times of coronavirus and confinement we will need to recover the best of ourselves and restore the acidity and melancholy in their original meanings and not in their scholastic interpretations, to stop the rapid debauchery of an ultra-liberal capitalism that moves away from the essentiality of living beings , destroys community ties and collapses the fate of the planet into laziness, fear and ignorant and consumer complicity. It depends on each of us.
Confinement, 14th day.
Images that are imprinted on the brain in the midst of uncertainty, pain, media noise and solidarity. Drawing this series is cathartic, but I begin to feel the need to deliver again more rabid graphic ghosts. The dust, ash and graphite that I use for the drawings dissolves like the time of parenthesis lived these days. The non-consistency of these insistently shaped materials dissolves in the hands, the papers and on the table. Only by erasing after scattering the dirt do the lights appear. Maybe it will be like this in the times that come and that I am not able to glimpse
Confinement, 32nd day.
As in any collection, the images that are at the origin of this type of file that I call Black Bile come from diverse affiliations. Some of them are born from the contemplation of some objects in my close environment, others obey a repeated fixation, as in the case of hands showing or holding objects; there are those that come from historical photographs of buildings, designs and posters of authors related to the Bauhaus (Moholy Nagy, Herbert Bayer, Renger Patzsch), and stimulate the memory and desire of a way to put visual grammar and art into play in relation to the world. There are also those that fragment the figure or frame the space in a format that skews the gaze or focuses it towards a point. All in all, the heterogeneous appropriation of motifs and the composition of its final arrangement are intended to form an unordered visual continuum, where, through the directionality of lines, the contours of the volumes and the relationship between light and dark are diluted in a series of abstract figures beyond obvious recognition.
The confinement caused by the terrible pandemic is full of unknown silences, tremendous uncertainties, painful absences, and long time. The practice of drawing becomes an attempt at biased meditation, it makes a conscious distraction in this parenthesis and offers a way of appropriating a reality that melts in your hands.
Lately I think if the artistic fact is possible without a hand to do and an eye to see, I suspect it is, but that we do not realize and that this is probably a gratuitous doing, radically free, not vain and that has always existed in the Absolute silence or in the self-sufficient nature, the one that has no memory, no conscience but it does power, entropy and works beyond human action.