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the act of drawing as the product of the direct connection between the body
and mind. Just like the fluid yellow of his paintings, his drawings do not seek
depth but instead remain on the surface in order to blur the boundaries and
liberate themselves from the space they occupy. This is an undefined aspect that
is accentuated with the erased lines that nonetheless still remain, which remind us
that everything is a process and that there is no precise end. This interest in zones
of uncertainty acts metaphorically as an affirmation of our subjugation to time.
We are left with the same intensity and uncertainty in the paintings by
Günther Förg and the photographs by Aitor Ortiz, Anna Malagrida and Vik
Muniz. In all of them, we can witness a conflict between the figurative and the
abstract. In the case of Muniz, this can be seen directly in the freezing of a
brushstroke, in the gesture of painting, which was an important achievement for
the future of painting when Roy Lichtenstein decided to do it decades ago. All
the spontaneity associated with the gesture is subverted in an indirect, cold and
calculated process of a slow, fine brushstroke which is also comparable to the
representation of any object. From this we can deduce, and this is not a minor
matter, that the brushstrokes in Lichtenstein or Muniz are no longer abstract
and are instead comparable to any other figurative motif, thus breaking the
figuration/abstract dichotomy and becoming simultaneously a pictorial sign
and artistic icon. Meantime, proposals like those by Günther Förg, Aitor Ortiz,
Deva Sand and Sean Scully are a latent experience about the world which is
also asked of the viewer. It is curious how the contrast between what light hits
and what is abandoned dominates. In all of them, there is a kind of interstitial
tension common to views that seek the margins, the boundaries. The view is lost
and the mystery is concealed, even though everything is there, simplified. They
are works that absorb a weight, that emphasise the opaque.
Faced with these works, we might think about Friedrich’s seas of fog, or
about the chaotic density of Constable’s studies of clouds. In the words of Didi-
Huberman, “when seeing means feeling something that ineluctably escapes us:
in other words, when seeing is losing”. This abysmal condition can also be seen
in the work of Jason Martin or the dark vertigo of the work by Peter Halley. It is
the image as experience, strange and yet familiar at the same time. As if the goal
were to reconstitute the poetic substance as image. The limits of sensation are
passed, exceeded, projected to serve the vibration. Something like a rhythm that
is freed by being unfrozen, a deformation without moving from the place that
reminds us of the reflection of glass in Bacon’s paintings, as he tried to bring the
viewer and his or her context into the argument of the image. But here the goal is
not to reflect the viewer but to try to get different vantage points. With this game,
this idea of the window in Förg or Malagrida, of the cell in Halley, of the wall in
Sand or Scully, the boundaries between inside and outside become blurred.
In other cases, the window opens to nowhere and the perceptive logics that
historically characterise painting are dismembered. This is the case of Ignasi
Aballí and José Pedro Croft. In both cases, there is a dialogue between the
dynamic and the static. Smells evaporate, from transparency in the former and
from hidden colour in the latter. It is curious how the idea of place, the position of
the sight, is reaffirmed through architectural drawing. It is similar to trying to fold,
unfold and refold the image, a way of playing with margins and fragments, with
disorders and perversions, until reaching an interesting state of ‘suspension’.
We are talking about painting, a kind of painting where time is experienced.
Works like those by Jessica Stockholder show the complex relationship between
the illusionistic space of painting and the physical presence of sculpture. Like
in the works by Jonathan Lasker, Art & Languaje, Federico Herrero and Luis
Gordillo, there is a kind of condensation of events within a painting, as if one
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