Artist's Book Yearbook 2003-2005 - Book Arts - University of the ...

The physical production of the book is good
and benefits the work as a whole: a smooth
bookcloth in a sharky-grey gives way to welldeployed
luxury materials within, couching the
the fine printmaking in fine papers. Black,
white and red echo the symbolic colours of the
text, and translucent ruby-plastic text pages
veiled the images in a suggestive, half-seen
suspense. I found the book production hightly
professional and enjoyable to handle.
Buenos Aires
Ral Veroni
Ral Veroni’s Buenos Aires is a book in the form
of a series of related cards, accompanied by a
colophon and notes. It features the figures I’ve
seen before in prints by Veroni: glyphic
personages impinging on the skyline like
Japanese monsters, by way of Mexican hero -
wrestlers, accoutred strangely, with their
godlike accessories. Hammers, sickles,
improbable decorations and masks. Staring
skywards and raking the horizon with their
electrical-impenetrable gaze like socialist
sculpture produced directly from the
unconscious of the workers. Ral is from
Argentina but lives in Glasgow now. One figure,
a representation of the She-Wolf suckling
Romulus and Remus, is described by Veroni in
his notes:
“The wolf was the symbol of Rome. In a city like
Buenos Aires it also marks the presence of the
massive Italian immigration... The Wolf Departs is
an attempt to symbolise in an image the return
of the discouraged sons of the immigrants to
the land of their forefathers.”
It made me think also of the Scottish/Italian
sculptor Edouardo Paolozzi, whose work
showing massive, fragmentary feet and hands
recall the broken statues one finds in Rome.
They pop up in conurbations across Scotland
(and elsewhere), where they’re well liked, and
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routinely covered in chip papers tossed away by
our homegrown urchins. Both these bits of
statuary, and Veroni’s autochthonic sky-geezers
look out across their environments with the
mixture of insecurity and hope we get from any
sense of history. There’s a lingering
communication implied in these glances
though: a communication between generations
and continents that asks in which direction the
communication is going. Are the discouraged
sons finding their courage again? When they
return, where will they return to? Are these
personages on the skyline above our cities
ready for us to use, or are we, like the one
holding the sickle, simply not able to control
the dominating and rapacious power of these
heroes? The sickle man is bent-backed, unsure,
so the sickle twists around, becomes a question
mark instead. Who knows what the real
character of this power is? This figure is
Absurdity: he’s maybe taking the piss out of us
mortals for having a go at controlling our lives.
On other pages the figures biff each other with
hammers, are poised, ready to smash up the
forest of communications around them like
Gods disgusted to find that their worshippers,
becoming bored, have turned to other things to
fill their world.
In other pages the figures - I’m starting to think
of them as a family of Gods, irascible, powerful
and unpredictable - are looming over bleak
skylines of clocks without hands. In another, a
red skull, eyes obscured by a bone and looking
like something out of the Codex Borgia
(a collection of Mexican (Aztec) writings)
hovers threateningly in a district of faceless,
hermetically dull buildings. Ready to smash the
puny mortals. Well, history does that - we’ve no
need of Gods to do the same: rather these are
the parts of human character that’d like to