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estrangement of the body is like depicting death. Barceló builds his imagination
in that indeterminate zone and effects a change in order, like when the figure in
Bacon breaks with the figurative. It is a challenge to anatomy, and everything
becomes a single shape, an enigma which is proffered as a perceptive fissure, as
a sensation. Just as in Bacon, there is a zone of indiscernibility, as Deleuze would
say, where everything tends to escape. But at the same time, I understand that
works like those by Marty and Barceló are close to the eroticism that Bataille
tells about. To the latter, death is the greatest violence since it uproots us from
our obstinate desire to watch our own discontinuousness last. Here, death as
regeneration is a kind of eroticism, in this zeal to cross all boundaries. Bataille
speaks of how after decomposition new forms of life arise tout court. In both
cases, the viewer enters an intimate space, one where we can smell more than we
can hear. The image is a murmur. Death agony is depicted, as with Christo and
his wrapped bouquet of roses. It is not life everlasting conserved in a vacuum but
immanent death by asphyxiation or the impossible capture of the ephemeral.
That relationship with the ephemerality of existence appears in Javier Arce’s
depiction of Ophelia; on his series of pressed papers he draws celebrated works in
the history of painting with a marker on paper. Ophelia, inexpressive, deranged
by love, is formalised as a brief mark, as a vague, fugitive form about to vanish.
Arce starts with the celebrated painting that John Everet Millais rendered on this
Shakespearian myth. They are streaks that shape and permeate everything with
their scent, just like the works by Antoni Muntadas or Perejaume. In the latter,
it is the scent of the sound of a spring burbling. Surely it is always different, but
with the capacity to always seem the same. Like the flavours of childhood, like the
scents of the past. Perejaume paints the traces of what the burbling spring marks,
the ergography of its own sound, its own writing. Water here is synonymous with
life and allows a space of the imaginary to be built, as in a dream. Painting reveals
a reality of fleeting outlines, something that we can detect in works like those by
Herbert Brandl, Albert Oehlen, Adam Fuss, Tim White-Sobieski, Helmut Dorner,
Juan Uslé and the aforementioned Perejaume.
I am thinking about how Monet abandoned the technique of drawing to focus
on colour, on that fusion of form and background which characterised him. That
balanced tension gains momentum in the work of Cézanne, where the materiality of
the pigments comes to the fore. The ‘reserves’ or empty parts which can be glimpsed
amidst the white of the canvas in some of Cézanne’s unfinished portraits mean that
his brushstrokes never seem definitive. Herbert Brandl also perches in that ambiguous
position, since many of his works could be considered figurative, but many of them
also allude to an abstraction resulting from their dissolution in colour. Somehow, we
could talk about control and lack of control in his work, because Brandl explores the
surface, density, volume and, in short, a process that he views as an ongoing interactive
reaction; first space, then ink, and later the spatiality of the surface… Brandl wonders
when we have control over a painting and confesses that his interest revolves
around being able to face it, and letting it surround or envelop him. Brandl
advocates the gestural and surprise, so he makes use of the characteristic of ink,
its fluidity. In his works, just as in those by other artist friends of his with whom
he has shared exhibitions, such as Helmut Dorner, we can claim that he ‘puts
the paint to work’ so that the shape emerges. Thus we understand why Dorner
has entitled the text that accompanies his work ‘el paseo’ or ‘the stroll’, narrating his
poetic peregrination. These artists view painting as an act and a process, like Juan
Uslé, Albert Oehlen, Jessica Stockholder, etc. Like the revelation of the water in Adam
Fuss, full of beauty and mystery. He needs no advanced technology, no camera; his
language is nature. Like Dorner and Brandl, he harbours a great deal of romanticism.
We wonder where the figurative ends and the abstract begins, or vice-versa.
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