The Semantique turn

Abdel Hernandez San Juan

The Semantique Turn

Writings on art and culture from semiotic theory to semantique analysis

contents

introduction: from semiotic theory to semantique analysis

The Cognitive turn

Art pizte: exploring interdisciplinary displays

The Gaze Resilience: A Duple archaeology

The Principles of Informalism

Join contemplation

Material biography

Another folds of the soul

Weaves

Gesture/text: an hermeneutical approach

introduction: from semiotic theory to semantique analysis

By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Semantic theory or semantic analysis is and has always been an area or subspecialty within semiotic theory, the latter understood as an autonomous and well-formed scientific discipline. Umberto Eco, to cite just one example, dedicated careful developments to semantics both in The Absent Structure, as well as in Lector in Fabula, however, neither many nor abundant semantic theories developed for cultural analysis that it is possible to develop through the semiotic theory or semiology of visual and iconographic languages, that is, as Barthes understood it, of object languages ​​and specifically within the latter what Peirce called the iconic sign.

On the other hand, the studies of isotopia or semantic congruence that have acquired their development in the field of narratology and the study of the novel, have not gone beyond the scope of literary criticism on fictional languages.

The possibility of developing forms of semiotics of art that are at the same time forms of cultural analysis that acquire the value of cultural anthropology, requires, from my point of view, to explore ways and alternatives of approaching the visual that from the semiotic theory of the visual achieve and reach cultural analysis via semantic studies.

To this effort I have dedicated significant efforts in several of my theoretical books, as well as practiced that relationship between semiotics and semantics, in my empirical criticism of writing on forms of the visual arts, however, it remained to focus together the criticism of anthropology and art criticism as cultural analysis relates both things, I set out to put together a series of approaches, statements or critical approaches that range from the criticism of anthropology, through the criticism of art and anthropology to the criticism of visual arts.

For this purpose, I put together, on the anthropology side, a short text of mine about Stephen Tyler, whose cognitive studies in semantic theory in anthropology are an indispensable reference, and another about an interdisciplinary art and anthropology exhibition in which I participated as a professor. Invited, I gave a lecture developed as a reading of an essay of mine between semiotics and semantics about that exhibition of Quetzil Eugenio in which I conceived its museographic spatialization by putting conceptual and visual scene on the anthropology of Quetzil Eugenio and his collections of Mayan art in collaboration with quetzil. On the other hand, I gathered a series of my essays on contemporary art in which, at the level of writing, I developed an analysis between semiotics and semantics.

The Cognitive Turn

By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Written and composed in English
by Abdel Hernandez San Juan

  Given to his peculiar, unique attention to what Derrida defined as the “wishes to said”, (El Querer Decir), the relation between expression and form as a Thinker Stephen A Tyler seems to be near to expressionism in philosophy, as explicit in his themes and issues The Unspeakable, (Lo Inablable o Inexpresable), The Said and the Unsaid, (Lo Dicho y lo no Dicho) or in his beautiful, commotional essay in response to me, Evocation: the Unwriteable, A Response to Abdel Hernandez San Juan, on evocation to language, trope, writing, silence, memory and everyday life sublime, to both special and common sense languages, something that can also suggest Stephen affinities to philosophical anthropology, except by his attention to more complex theoretical issues evolving abstract imagination as explicit in his rich essay Alternatives Linguistics: Remediation’s, and his accents to rhetoric’s. 

  I consider Stephen A Tyler a major classical thinker, founder of cognitive anthropology in USA since the sixties and one of the abstracts and deepest, profound theoreticians of his generation in USA and around the world, he has being inspirational to a new generation of united states young thinkers in USA as myself Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Quetzil Eugenio, Between others. 

   As explicit in his presenter Display edited by Lyotard and the impact of his work in Germany and Europe, Stephen work is being progresibly each time more philosophical than linguistic or anthropological, (his volumes with Ivo Sketcher from Germany). 

   As Geertz anticipated claiming and invoquing Stephen, while questioning the difficulties of anthropology to be an intellectual force in contemporary thought, Stephen A Tyler (his works, essays, writings), as Boudieu or Boudrillard from Europe, but from a unique point of view, develop a rich entrance of anthropology in contemporary thought, as deepest as the first Chomsky, (transformational grammatic, syntactic theory), but lees motivated, exceptic to politics. 

Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Ah Dzib Pízté: Exploring Interdisciplinary Displays. Workshop and Exhibit at Durant Gallery

By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Free Lance

Ŵritten and composed in English by Abdel Hernandez San Juan

  This letlee paper is about an experience consisting on an exhibit and a workshop I participated as a formal guest of the Faculty of Sociology and Anthropology of the Lake Forest College during the ŵinter of 1999, traveling from Houston ŵere I am established living since 1997 ŵith a fellow as a research associate anthropology faculty at rice university, school of social sciences, the experience itself ŵas my first travel to Chicago, and it supposed to be practice after several weeks participating at the National Congress of anthropology.    

  As soon as the congress ended Lisa, Quetzil and me, ŵe established ourselves living in an apartment in the city of Chicago and then daily traveling to Lake Forest which is near to 30 or 45 minutes far a ŵay on a train, a beautiful travel and also a beautiful letlee but natural Forest surrounded campus of very England, Victorian kind of architecture during a very could ŵinter under the snoŵ, whiten. 

  The experience to be developed consisted about an exhibit at the Durant Art Gallery of the free art college of the art Faculty even ŵhen it ŵas also possible thanks to the Faculty of sociology and anthropology, as I ŵas there invited and it included first a process of designing I conceived and conduced, it included museographizing, exhibiting, installing, lighting, distributing, taken spatial decisions, designing the exhibit as a ŵhole visually and conceptually.

  Such a process I conduced ŵas developed for around tŵo ŵeeks before the opening of the exhibit to the public ŵith lisa, quetzil and Anglo-American artists that year graduating as students from the art institute, art faculty and or the sociology one, and it evolved essentially tŵo kind of things to be spatially resolved, a first half ŵas directly related ŵith spatializing and museographizing quetzil himself, his kind as anthropologist, his tolls, stuffs, cameras, slides, videos, films, and a second half ŵas defined to be about then also spatializing his collection, museographizing it, installing it, distributing it, designing it. 

  Quetzil collection consisted about on Maya artesanies pieces of batiks and ŵoods, it revolves around a relationship betŵeen Quetzil and the Maya artisans ŵho did the pieces from his collection he decided to exhibit.

  In all my previous experiences as curator, including my previous one letlee serie of five exhibits I did, conceived, exhibited and presented as curator at Rice University tŵo years before, doing curatorial practices supposes to be overall selecting the artists and the artists pieces as I ever did before, it ŵas then to me a big challenge to participate as curator and museographer about something I did not selected myself, so having to figure out hoŵ to ŵork both designing and conceptualizing ŵith things I did not selected and I didn’t do, but things Quetzil did and collected.

  In this sense it remains me a concept I previously  conceived and proposed ŵhich ŵas that one of tollfully mixing spatially museographizing and stage designing as an interdisciplinary practice of conceptualizing and doing ethnography and in this sense it ŵill be probably better to think about an exhibit experience ŵith three curators, myself centered about designing as a whole an exhibiting of Quetzil stuffs kinds as anthropologist, Quetzil, ŵho stay around a relation betŵeen each one piece and each one artisan ŵho did it and Lisa Breglia who stay betŵeen me and Quetzil. 

  By this reason our accents and attentions as co-curators ŵas compliment both theoretically and practically, even ŵhen ŵe did it together in all the details, enthusiastically motivated and fully in agreement theoretically and experimentally discussing each decision to be taken in a successful consensus, expliciting and valuating reasons, and ŵhen ŵe both respect each one in doing it, there ŵas evolved participating in every conversation and spatial decision also Lisa Breglia playing a significant roll.

  I ŵill then define our accents as follow, first myself centered around the experience seen in a general field of curatorial practices that evolves high art curatorial practices as the experience ŵas certainly committed to be exhibited in a high art gallery of a free art institute of an art faculty and theoretically committed to consider reaming here for example Lyotard exhibit The Inmaterials at Pompidou to which I written regarding the inmaterials, lyotard at pompidue and as a guest from a Faculty of Sociology and Anthropology tryng to explore the interdisciplinary possibilities of it as an experience in the general field of curatorial practices in the United States, so my accent on all that from an Anglo-American perspective, the very young participants and the institution in USA.

  Second Quetzil, centered on an activity that evolved a direct relation between himself as anthropologist, his batiks and ŵood pieces from his collection and each maya artisants ŵho did it as a practice that evolved to him to be as a merchant one relationship within a market that supposes to be from a touristic market of buying and sailing it to a tourism market that supposes collecting and exhibiting it so to a certain point exploring a relationship betŵeen artisanies and art from the moment tourism artisanies are placed and exhibited at a high art gallery, it evolved to him also, not only a matter of market exchanges but also a part, or an specific moment of his oŵn fieldwork activity, that one around his relations, engagements and exchanges ŵith Maya artisans around the touristic markets and ruins of chichen itza in Yucatan, and finally Lisa Breglia ŵhos roll I ŵill say can be essentially defined to be a roll of communications in betŵeen me and my professional specialized expertise’s from the high plastic and visual art field theoretically and practically, and quetzil expertise ŵho can be defined in my opinion as a traditional anthropologist, and that ŵas great also to students. 

  The experience as a ŵhole can be characterized as it occurred practically, by a workshop of designing the exhibit I conduced ŵith young Anglo-Americans that year graduated artists and or from sociology faculty, lisa and quetzil, and by another ŵorskshop quetzil simultaneously conduced ŵith the maya artisans despite front the fact that ŵe all meet together at certain hours out of ŵork to dinner, relax, enjoy and various activities, it ŵas then a trilingual experience including English as the main language I speak, Spanish, Quetzil and Lisa speaks and Maya, Quetzil and the maya artists speaks. 

  The exhibit as a ŵhole ŵas defined by tŵo gallery rooms I decided to distributed the tŵo half’s previously explained, in a first room, the letlee one, I proposed, spatially composed and displayed a conceptual contemporary art environment installation on Quetzil as anthropologist spatially discussed and decided betŵeen me, Lisa and Quetzil in consensus after ŵeeks of analyzing getting as a whole spatial result a general installation detailed discussed and respectfully consulted to Quetzil, so as a collaboration betŵeen me from the high arts, Lisa and Quetzil.

   This environment installation included three pieces visually, spatially and conceptually related and imbricated to a mixture as a ŵhole. A first piece, place at the background ŵall seen from the room entrance consisted on an unfolded Showcasing of the Touristic Scene on a rectangular and horizontal black box on a table ŵith an orifice for a vieŵer to look through an inside lightened series of Quetzil photography’s on the touristic market scenes of chichen itza in Yucatan around the maya pyramids and ruins.

  A second piece, placed on the right seen from the entrance consisted on a table ŵith a display of Quetzil tolls and stuffs as anthropologist including computer laptop exhibited and other electronic artifacts exhibited such as Quetzil video cameras, Quetzil photo cameras, Quetzil collected slides, Quetzil photography’s, Quetzil notes books, Quetzil office furniture’s and Quetzil printed and covered copies of visually illustrated paper backs and works in progress books he did on Yucatan, to viewers generally looks at it as a showcased mise in scene setting or optionally sit doŵn yet providing a chair to any curious slowly revise, read, open, ŵash or read the books.

  A Final piece of this installation ŵas displayed on the main room ŵall on the left seen from the entrance, I proposed it to be an screen projection of a continuum video from the laptop ŵith a constant film about Quetzil in everyday life exchanges and communications ŵith several maya artisans around their rural houses and spaces to carve, shape and engrave their ŵood pieces including audio so for a vieŵer to enjoy Quetzil in Fieldŵork and the artisans doing their pieces and speaking. 

  In the main and big gallery room I proposed to projected on a gallery front column seen from the Entrance, a continuum lup sequences ŵith images of Steguerda Cabinet, his environment Cabinet, an archaeologist ŵho stay doing archaeology fieldwork around the forties, many decades before Quetzil in the same places and about the same issues.  

   The reason to proposed such a lup at the main entrance of the gallery exhibit ŵas a conceptualist proposal committed to evoque a sobreordinated setting about both a general contemporary art exhibit and an anthropology that is not about a culture as by a first time, but about a culture that has being already previously many times both textually and visually approached, so as a palimpsestual sobreordination, something also successfully detailed discussed in consensus by me, Lisa and Quetzil since Quetzil himself as anthropologist explored a book not on Maya culture but on the museums of Maya culture as an anthropology of archaeology and museums practices.  It ŵas an spatial proposal based on the fact that Quetzil is being himself ŵriting papers on Stegerda. 

   Like the previous room this piece can be recognized mainly as collaboration betŵeen me, lisa and quetzil since I proposed it as an spatial design display visually and conceptually and since all ŵe did ŵas consensually discussed. 

  Since to the previous half explained environments decisions and pieces and stegerda lup I ŵas the main curator and museographer, to the main ŵalls and spaces of the big gallery room Quetzil asked to be reserved to exhibit his maya batik’s and ŵoods collection, the relation changed, noŵ Quetzil ŵas the main curator since he selected the maya artisans themselves each one ŵho did the pieces while I ŵorked this occasion mainly as an adviser museographer, museographizing Quetzil collection, suggesting light and montages solutions.

  However, the Workshops itself ŵas a beautiful experience as I explained before it included tŵo workshops, one I conduced ŵith young Anglo-American participants, Quetzil and Lisa regarding the first half already explained and my humble adviser to the second half something that occurred essentially around the gallery exhibit spaces montage process and a second one workshop conducted by Quetzil that included tŵo kind of things, first his explanations about his collaboration ŵith me coming from the high arts despite from his daily talks and second his explanations about his relations ŵith the Maya artisans.

  Finally as a result ŵe can say that this tŵo workshop relates and mutually benefits from the moment moving to everyday life ŵe ŵere all together enjoying a same life experience, Quetzil, me and Lisa living in a Chicago same apartment enjoying life activities in reciprocity and mutuality, lunch, dinner, daily conversations, or during the exhibit montage, taking time to rest out, inside and outside the art building, smoking cigarettes, enthusiastically theorizing anything motivated us, speaking about books, etc, ŵe experienced for example the Chicago book feria that time, waiting the train under the could snoŵ, having fun on daily things, visiting city places at nights, traveling ŵith Anglo-American artists and students and Maya artisan several times in a same bus, having conversations and life entertainments as ŵell. 

Notes

  The reason, endeavor, motive and purposes about being invited ŵas clearly expressed at the invitation letter, it approached me regarding the areas of research I am working on and accent on several things, ŵill be better then to directly quote the letter of invitation. 

Abdel Hernández San Juan

Artistic Director

Transart Foundation

1412 West Alabama

Houston, Texas, 77056

  This letter is to invite you to participate as a panellist on a Forum concerning “Maya Art and Anthropology” that will be held December 2, 1999, on the Lake Forest College Campus in Myer Auditorium –Hotchkiss Building. We fell that your areas of research and expertise are especially important for our discussion in that you may provide us with special insights and understandings to the issue of concern. This panel forms part of an ethnographic installation devoted to Maya Art and Anthropology and is conceived as an opportunity to discuss the exhibition component of this interdisciplinary event. 

   This art is of interest given that it has no prior history in the artworlds of the USA. The art itself originates in the context of the touristic and anthropological fascination with the Maya, especially in the context of the anthropological and tourist markets centered on the archaeological ruins of Chichén Itzá.      

  Thus, there are some interesting questions regarding the status and value of this artwork vis a vis other aesthetic traditions such as folklore, fine art, contemporary art, modernist art, etc. 

  Given that this exhibition is the first ever in the USA within a gallery setting, some interesting debates regarding how to curate, install, and market this art come immediately to the foreground.

  These questions connect up to the histories and roles of both anthropology as a discipline of collecting-exhibiting and museums as an institution devoted to the representation of cultural forms, whether they be aesthetic or ethnographic.    

  The interesting set of issues concerns curatorial practices and how they may be used as an ethnographic practice of representing cultures and cultural forms. Additionally, we are concerned to question the nature of anthropological installations of art by asking how such may be similar or different than other modes of exhibition in practical and theoretical terms. This is an especially interesting topic when the style of the ethnographic installation of art finds theoretical inspiration from the work of conceptual artists such as Kossuth and performance theory as developed in theatre anthropology and the arts. 

   We hope that this may be of interest for you and that you can join us for the panel. I will communicate with you directly so as to address any questions regarding your role in the panel or the installation in general if you choose to accept. Please find enclosed supplemental materials to provide you with greater information about this program of activities. 

Sincerely yours

Quetzil Eugenio

Assistance Professor

Department of Sociology and Anthropology

Lake Forest College

Lake Forest, IL 60045

References

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, The Intangible, Literary ŵork book as single ŵriter, author, composer, Abdel Hernandez San Juan Books, Houston, Texas, USA

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, The Curator as Creator, Caracas, Lecture discussed at the First Meeting of Art Curators, Neŵs Paper El Universal, Caracas, Venezuela, 1994

Abdel Hernandez San Juan and Stephen A Tyler, Seven Papers, A Neŵ Philosophical Conversation

Stephen A Tyler, Evocation, Response to Abdel Hernandez, Evocation, The Unŵriteable, A Response to Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Sep 9,

The gaze resilience: a duple archaeology

By Abdel Hernández San Juan

   Light is in nature, this is out of doubt, but light forth participates in our sense of presence, something must thus be presence to us only when light is there, whence, while light is nature, it also participates in the phenomenological assure which made us have a certitude of ourselves, with our subjectivity under it. 

  A river, is a natural phenomenon out of us but as soon as a river made presence to us through light according to our gaze, we can’t simply set aside as easy our subjective impression evolved through our gaze from the pregiven nature of it.

  Remembering that according to barthes, the gaze and the soul grow and born together –the soul born exactly when we must say that the gaze is already formed in the child--, the gaze is not a passive perception of the pregiven neither simply an objective reflection of nature.

  Like in the relation between our subjective sense of presence—which can’t be reduced to simple how light made presence possible to us, between our gaze and the pregiven nature of the objects of perception, we have the formation of something new

   However, such a something new can’t be comply in itself or acceded by simply exteriorizing perception and its objects as we receive it in a mere physical sense, only through the repetition a sign means to us, through the formation of a language from which we exteriorize our gaze as a sign of the gaze in front of us, we are available to perceive to what points something new takes shapes in between us and that which we see.

  To see is not the same than to see seen, we can see of course, another person, for example, far to us seen, a river for example, but in that form we can’t comply his gaze, we can’t simply take his or her eye and set it upon our body, his gaze will ever pertain or belong to another body eyes, to comply his gaze –even to comply our own gaze beyond the mere distinction between the eye and the object, we need to see it exteriorized in a language, we need to see seen while not from outside as a body eye, but acceding the interiority of the gaze which seen.

   It leads us to a language of the internal states of the subject, his, her or our gaze, nothing must thus be considered as internal to subjectivity than the gaze, but by seen the gaze exteriorized in a language in which the gaze is a sign of the gaze, we perceive that to see a river, to look at it is not the same than to see the signs of a gaze seen it, what was external to us a few minutes ago, seen another seen the river, pass by to be internal according to an exteriorized in language sign of the gaze.

  The Cristina Jadick gaze allow us here the internal image of her own gaze exteriorized through a sign of the gaze. The external become internal and in reverse, the internal external.

   This is to me what "into resilience", the recent exhibit of cristina Jadick, shows us in between the gaze, subjectivity and both our internal and external sensibilities on the river, ---to us as singles in subjectivity or to us as plural in the city of Houston.

   That which a minutes ago was external, to see another body seen –without to comply its internal sense of the gaze--or to feel the apperception of seen the river from own body eye without assuring on it, might now be an exteriorized image of the internal gaze and its soul the gaze evolve

 Distributed on a language surface -the beautifull and suggestives photography’s and mix medias of Cristina "into relisience"--we comply a plenty sense of an internalized river to subjectivity, hence language seen as an individuated processing by which we perceive the river now through the internal sign of a gaze, we perceived thus to see the seen. 

   Therefore, from the moment it usually conservate, detonates or better well correlates aspects of the identity of the pregiven to us, --differently to paintings or drawings—photography must thus be a privilege field to discuss this matter, since on the one hand the photographic sign show to us exteriorized as language, the sign of our gaze or our gaze exteriorized as a subject of visual enunciation to a viewer, while on the another hands, it never lost or lack the clues or indicial codes of something pregiven from which the impressions of the gaze source. 

   Let then just define this as a correlate.

   Moreover, the relation between perception and the object of perception is from my point of view often disatended in all its possibilities under contemporary art criticism usually regarded to mere ocular or optical regards.

   To me one of the more interesting results of cristina mix media installations and photography’s installations must be indeed entailed to this original, rich way she have attained to provide images around this matter. 

   What I consider curious about her more recent exhibit "Into resilience", it is precisely how her exhibit is avoiding her usual ways to explore the paradoxes evoqued above, here she is helping us to distinguish in a more well defined form what she have usually mixed under her former exhibits, perception and the object of perception.

   Why is she doing that?. An exhibit of photography’s from which perception and its object are no longer exactly the same.

   Must we sustain a certain resilience between perception and the object in natural terms?. 

  Is this exhibit devoted to shows and explore the natural principles of a certain mixing of perception and its objects?.

   The idea of resilience suggest a certain natural argue since as recognized within the several photography’s and landscapes integrates the show, resilience must be find in nature itself something she explores and accent by interposing all the time the resilience’s of the river natural elements.

  At "Into resilience", more than any time before, the elements in play, perception on the one hand and its objects on the other, seems to be more aside than often in her art, thus, besides, not necessarily as a way to renounce or exit her usual semantical conjunction of both things at a language surface of sense, sensibility and meanings in which perception and the object often appeared as one and the same thing.

   I have argued before on her exhibits the exploration of a kind of philigrane between light and textures creating something similar to what I have defined as liminality.

  Better well she invites us to accent this time on the distinction itself as it helps to clarify how the elements in play –here mostly the land art elements of her art--must be understanded as originally entailed.

  Often the mixing of installation, povera and land art creates a profusion of elements from which the land art elements often linked to spatiality and more precisely to natural spatiality tends to be lost and lack, from this perspective, I consider "Into resilience", as an exhibit by which recalling the distinction perception/the object, we must have a sense too of the need of spatiality to lands art and its importance regarding the subject in question to this exhibit, the bayou river. 

  What we have here thus must be recognized as an archaeology of the usually misregarded relation between lands art, natural spatiality and landscapes, while not as much to maintain it aside, but besides to be distinguished in between, both, perception and the spatiality of nature and the gaze and its landscapes, exploring how this original entailing of land art and landscapes spatiality must be increase and enlarged semantically to research relations between subjectivity, nature and culture.

  It allow us to know how land art should be considered as a pivotal element of her art not as much this time loosed and or lacked under povera and installation elements, but revoqued, recalled and explored from mix media landscapes, photo print making and photography’s.

  In fact, as much as we have this time pieces letting distinguished the gaze and the river landscapes as much as we also have ways through which the collected matter finded in the river transform the canvas itself or the surface of the frame into  metonyms of the river surfaces. The river matters, fund objects entrace to the canvas or bidimensional surface collected and weaved over it.

  While this is also, paradoxically, a metonym of its own showcasing as signs of her gazing, that semiological inventory of a sense of the "I was there" of all this collected material as inventories of things collected from the river on the canvas surface now in reversal, not only the relisience of the river weaving the canvas but the relisiense of the gaze weaving the river in subjectivity.

   The ambiguity to choice and or to accent one thing over the another, looks to be –according to the exhibit as a whole—intentional, more or less considered as a metonyms of the river surfaces or instead of the art painting showcasing of the river motives inventories, it leads us to a duple simultaneous archaeology.

  It is at the same time both things: a negation of the art piece as an external observer, or as a mere archaeological collector of inventory evidences to instead recodify the frame conventions with the trope of resilience’s arriving from the river natural weaves toward the effacing’s between perception –the piece—and its objects--and in reverse it is also a negation of the object as an exteriorized denoted or pre-given fact to instead let work the tropes of resilience now in reverse arriving from the gaze soul and proving to our image of the river a sense of it through subjectivity and the sensoritality of our bodies to which the river made sense.  

  The accent on spatiality by the way is far to be absent or new within cristina art, on the one hand, even when we are speaking here on spatiality regarding the river, the sites of reality objects to perception evoqued by the landscapes, spatiality as a matter of language defines semantically the main ways she have explored installation art ever while on the other considered as an external issue beyond the spaces of installative language she have being in recent years included at exhibits focusing on it such as for example the exhibit "Places" and she herself seems to be usually attentive to it if we pay attention for example to her choices of exhibits such as "on sites" at her facebook.

   Now, besides the richness that made specific "Into resilience" we must add the comments of its comparative nature so that as much as comparably to another cristina exhibits "into relisience" appears as a seldom one by how the eye and its objects appears as distinguished but it is however yet as ever in her art an issue often disseminated. 

  In a few words, even at "into relisience", an exhibit defined by asking to what point the mixings must indeed be finded in nature, the relation between the gaze –perception, the eyes, etc, and the pregiven in nature motive, topic, issue, theme, etc, is yet mixed, shifted, blowred, disseminated, explored according to its resonances to and through subjectivity and sensibility more than afforded as something objectibly exterior to the internal feelings and multisensorialities of sensibility.

   Thus therefore, what we should really point here as pivotal must be this, that as much as we know that perception and its objects are asides, separated, distinct things as much as we ask to ourselves why instead are we usually endowing it and or seizing it as if an integrated dimension under one and the same thing.

  The answer to this paradoxical question not as easy to be solve is on the side of sense and meaningful, we integrate it because it made sense to us, because it is meaningful to us. 

  So the river as a landscape must be exteriorized as pregiven to us in nature, but we can’t as easy be observers from such a pregiven when we feel the river in our sensibility and when the river made sense through our subjectivity a sense of ourselves and of our city. This is to me what the exhibit is telling US.

   Our sensibility, the soul of our gaze and the river are weaved into a relisience that coming from the river nature explaings the same principles order the relisience of our gaze

   Reality itself in fact phenomenologically speaking complexion to our senses in a similar way, we know that something made presence to us in forms, we know that we have an impression of it as external to our palpable sensoriality—a data of our senses, but we instead tend to integrate what we know is aside, perception and its objects since this objects means and made sense to us so that we can’t as easy set aside the physical optical from the sensible, if the gaze and the soul grow together since childhood, something increase, extend, transform and disseminate perception into sensibility. 

  Liminality explains that.

  Recovering the spalitiaty of both lands art and the objects, we must point out that again like in her usual ways to afford natural issues---the gulf coast and beaches under previous exhibits or simply her constant allusion and inclusions of natural matters such as tries, earth, etc, the way she have afforded the bayou river must be seen as a continuation of her usual research on environmental issues conceptually seen as a research on subjectivity and culture.

  Certainly we have here more than ever before some pieces we may regard even as landscapes in which the river is out there represented, but we also have on the other hand an exploration of the river to subjectivity according to how it might be considered culturally to sensibility and the soul. 

  To those as me, who know by experience the importance of this river in the city –I even was living a few meters from the bayou several years—the river means a lot more than just a natural landscape to a passive gaze, it is as well entailed with our soul of the city and subjectibly weaved into many things

  her exhibit thus can’t be comply without this dimension of the river to subjectivity

  she even remember the issue of human adaptation when natural disasters ocurred somewhen ago so that from near photography’s of the water, of the sky and of the tries, to photography’s of human furniture’s fragmented and or juxtaposed as intimacy memories, the exhibit conjunction  a constant allusion to the relation between a kind of relisience that must be find as something arises and source from nature itself into a relisience to which we need both to adequate and or mix, fusion or add perception and the object –the gaze with its soul beyond just an optical perceptual apparatus—as to be adaptive ourselves to the challenges nature often mean to us.

  In fact, cristina, according to a series of exhibits I experienced the opportunity not only to see in person but to know since the process through which she was conceiving and composing it from her studio, might be defined as the artist who in a more unusual and original way is being developing works around this matter

  Considered from three of her exhibits I know, she have research a kind of effacing or shifting, blowing of the boundaries between perception and the object attempting and attaining a density of matter semantique memory though which the distinction between perceiving and the perceived, perception and the object is mostly relativized toward a surface of sensoritality and sensibility in which semantically perception and the object looks to fusion one into the another.

  It is ever at Cristina works as if something from the object were added and or distributed or disseminated as one in itself with the surface of perception

  This idea of surface of perception must be however clarify here as to attain a better elucidation of the issue in question back to our former considerations around the signs of the gaze. 

  In fact, we must identify the mere optical between an active perceptual observation with the eyes of an external, so to speak, pregiven object  of perception, an ordinary object we can see pregiven as a natural landscapes, a case in which we are representing the pure relation between both things our eye gaze and the object of it, from how perception beyond the physical optical, must be recognized outside us at the level of signs and icons, or at the level of a matter which distributed as a language outside us, as the language surface of a work of art, replace our mere optical perception by signs of it, 

  certainly, it is not the same distinguishing perceiving with our physical eyes than recognizing by clues and or by language visual icons in a work of art perception as a subject of the visual language enunciation, when we see a photography and distinguish the photographer gaze from the object photographed, everything is not already perception and object, but signs of it under a language symbolization, we can’t see the photographer and its objects, but the signs of the gaze with its clues of an omised subject we may infer from how the scene is being distinguished at the photo level, 

  we can say that we are an eye of our body objects, but at the level of an art piece language our body perception is no longer there, instead, a sign replace both the gaze and its objects, substituting it by clues of the as if, certainly, perception and its object appears at the art language level as a subject of a visual discourse and is transformed as such into a semantical code of the visual signs, besides, it is not already perception, but communication and meaning including the ways to mean the gaze itself now considered as a symbolic dimension of the piece

  In this specific sense we need to identify at the art language, an installation using fund object, fund material, textures, light, photography as under her earlier exhibit the sound of silence, or an exhibit mainly defined by photography’s and landscapes as her more recent one into resilience how the relation have evolutioned to be developed and research by cristina 

  and in doing so I think that a turn from the liminal or liminality to into resilience works in her exhibit as a return to a more distinguished distinction between the elements in play, now perception and its object defined as pregiven natural landscapes, are remarkable

  Back to the point during several of her installations we might recognize a conjunction through which usually gave as form of language at the piece level the signs of perceiving collected as inferences from the piece language level, a photography of the sensoriality, sound and effects of waves, the texture of the found objects and the sands layering the light, perception and the object seems to occupy a same dimension in a surface as if integrated one into the other. 

  This integration, usual in her installations, as discussed above, when we well know that objectibly, perception and the object are two separated things, must be understanded as a matter of sense. If we integrate it as one and the same thing the organ of perception and its perceived object beyond its aside nature, its is because we make sense of that objects or to be more clear, because such object are full of sense to us, its is in a few words according to sense and meaningfulness that we use to integrate both thing one into the another

   Liminality entrance here to explain why perception beyond be identified as just an optical operation must thus be indeed comprehended as something that increase and enlarge sensibility, as soon as the sensibly and the sublime participate through sense and meaningfulness into the signs of perception, the mere physical is turned into a semantical category, from such a moment, at the level of language perception and the object appears a weaves as philigraned, as tamizes of filtered and layered as mutually defined dimensions.

  Most of the amazing installations, mix media, collages and juxtapositions often under cristina Jadick art becomes unique and originals precisely according to how this issue have become a major dimension of her art. I would even say that we can’t comply semantically a plenty understanding of her art without this discussion, a dense surface of cumulated natural matters semantique memory in many of cristina installations must be regarded to this issue about which "Into resilience’s" brings a renewed light.

The Principles of informalism

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Houston, Texas, USA

   I am hearing someone naming Terrell James, speaking on her in a thirst person and my feeling is depth, Terrell James, Terrell James, it is like saying Mel chin, or Tracy hicks or Grotfeld, a regional, Texas local art which has being always a characteristic of usa art first strongly stablished in cultural regions and later moved through national or international scenarios,

   she is a subtly, delicated and refined woman, whose work communicates something of the soul of a cultural region, Houston-and Texas, she has explored a cultural informalism something unknown yet previously through informalism even in the united states, her work communicates cultural resonances of Texas land and the border culture, but from the individual person interior subjectivity perspective

   We have in Texas two artists with this mud. 

    Cristina Jadic, on the one side, looking to it through bilinguism, her mother and family customs, and Terrell James a unique artist too, an art teacher and editor, exploring the cultural memories not as much through figurative icons as in Christina images or the resonances of matter, but through the pure abstract focusing the organic relation between forms and habitat, forms and the body 

  she have something europeans too, her informalism remains something of the earlier usa informalist turn of the late fifties and sixties—Tombly, tombey, Klein, and something of the earlier european informal expressionism, Kandinsky, klee, however, exploring something new, not as much evolved in paying attention to the mere accidental of the chemistries and effects of pigments informal gestures on canvases –or the illusionism’s possible to be created within it, as Tombey did, nor even a microscopic attention to gestures as clues as Klein did, or like it was in usa sixties when the canvas was conceived as a surface interface to inscribe the clues of unpredictable spontaneity of color, forms and matter, not as much concerned with an idea of the order of cosmogony, religious ecstasies or mere attention to principles of abstract orders such as structures and geometries in earlier Mondrian, or the expression of interior dramas or existential states as it was in Kandinsky or Klee, it is instead another kind informalism more organic in the way it distribute the grammar and sintaxis of elements, forms, colour, tones, atmospheres, elements and backgrounds, etc, 

   Something remains me to be more near to Cezanne because of his attitude to the canvas, even when there is not like in Cezanne figurations not realistic representational images, we should remember that Cezanne was important to cubism when something to be discovered, synthetized and or analyzed while being abstract, Cezanne, for example, he painted the river water with the qualities of the sky or the trips consistency or perhaps he painted tries with the liquid qualities of water fluids exchanging subjects and predicaments, names and qualities, painting the river water as if impregnated by the consistency of tries was not yet regarded to put out or socialize interior expressionists states of the subject dramas, but yet to explore relations between subjectivity feelings and nature

   Something like this can be perceived in Terrell informalism while nor only in regard to nature but to the inmediacy of habitat both to the body as to the soul. This is on the other side, a kind of more philosophical meaning of informalism, in fact, if we really ask ourself on the deeper sense of informalism, its primary regards to human principles, we will note that, like expressionism was ultimately regarded to the basic principle of expressing since childhood, surrealism to imagination, and abstraction, cubism, minimalist and conceptualism, to analysis, synthesis or engineering logarithms, the primary regard of informalism is related alive environment, to life and to habitat. She has clarified and lighted that about in informalism and never before another artist. Why informalism should be here the question, how to answer the regards of informalism to main and basic human principles without confusing it with expressionism and abstractionism which are certainly apparently nears to the informal. Terrell James answered that question as never before

   Terrell work suggest to be or evoque something of the Cezanne attitude to the canvases like cubist painting was, that kind of equilibrium or balance, while at the same time she is not a cubist, but an informalist, there is not only an organic assumption of form, surface or colour by which I mean a relation between her informalism and the body on the one hand meaning with organic something effacing the boundaries between body and its environmental immediacies, habitat and related notions such as custom, habits, everyday rituals, surroundings, but also a very subtly and refined sense of the soul harmony in space and time. Her work should be perceived with details and proximity minuciocity, the form she applies the stein, the calm and composition of forms in the whole, the tones. 

   Her work is not dramatic or theatrical, all the opposite, it is diaphanous and honest

   She is however at the same time, something itself amazing, a field artist, her awareness to field studies and field issues even considered culturally can be defined as really unusual and unique, something explored not in the sense of things done out of the canvases, like for example in her labor as art editor or art teacher, but in her canvas, in the semantique and meanings of her atmospheres and universes. In this sense, she is always over.

Join contemplation, (Chicago and Rotterdam)

By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Free Lance

Written and composed in English 

by Abdel Hernandez San Juan

   This paper is inspired in a workshop conversation session I participated about an October upcoming experience introduced by tŵo both artists and curators recently graduated from The University of Chicago, Dan Paz (Chicago) and Marilyn Volkaman, (Rotterdam) working in partnerships, something ŵe experienced in the afternoon under the skay at the back yard second floor of The Cockier industry Galpon, June 2, 4, 6, 2015 ŵith USA, Canadian and Cubans artists and creators.

  Our short but beautiful conversation ŵas deeper and sublime, something I want to express using an Stephen A Tyler expression on mutuality and reciprocity as a Joining contemplation ŵhen the distinctions between us and them no longer ŵork and ŵe are not longer the object of their possessions, an instant moment, ŵhen Marilyn synthesis expressing “it seem that ŵe are going to really solid points”.

  “Moreover, the kind of reciprocity entailed here is not expressed in the grammar of differentiated subjects and objects, us and others. It requires instead, something like the idea of the middle voice in which subject and object, us and them, are not differentiated, but are mutually implicated in some ongoing process or performance whose meaning cannot be predicted before hand, but may found simply in the activity itself or Possibly in its joint contemplation. The ideas of mutuality and reciprocity conveyed by the middle voice establish a world of participation in which the distinction between us and them no longer function, a world where others are not reduced to objects of our desire and we are not possessed by them”. Stephen A Tyler, Evocation, A Response to Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Sept 9, Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA

   According to Marilyn the experience to come suppose to be architecturally seen as a societary horizontal community engaged art experience ŵith two accents main concepts “exchanges” and “gifts”, a sense of gifts near to having a present. As a free Market and art community experience to come I am seduced, persuaded and attracted by Marilyn and Dan explanation on exchange and Gift as mostly the tŵo main concepts to explore, in fact I think about it is as a very original and unique format to be explored, I am open and purely curious, a  pristine quality feeling as a single, on hoŵ are they both to conduct an experience as beautiful, also happy since I perceived Marilyn and Dan motivated to explore the possible Horizonts to theoretical development on both concepts. But certainly theorizing should based on experience and serves to something. By the mid time let just be open letting it go as an experience to happens to enrich ourselves ŵith learning surprises.

  However, inspired to givens, there is certain axiology matters of a very practical nature I think ŵill be good to anticipate something I defined as a necessity to qualify, some advances for example on axiology seen as a matter of values formations in practical senses if ŵe are specting mutuality, reciprocity and engagements. 

   With the age of generalized business, internet technologies, cyberspaces and online realities art curatorial practices are progresibly mutating asking to be abstracted and theorized, needing neŵ philosophical developments. As a matter of facts the field of curatorial practices is being today challenged by the high velocities of technology communication consequences on production, and biseversa. 

  Hoŵ can curatorial practices be at the same time spatial exhibiting and both intellectual and practical statements to the complexities of social values mediations, promotions and releasing, ŵhen the high velocities of technologies as the internet’s, onlines realities and cyberspaces environments, mediated themselves space and time realities?. Hoŵ should today curatorial practices answers to the challenges of being at the same time spatial practices and social values mediation ŵhen the technologies it supposes to be produced are the same technologies and ŵith the same velocities it need to be releases, promotes, circulates, distributes, publish, online, announce, site, index, search?. 

  As soon as a curatorial practice need to obtain spaces to exhibiting and as soon as it need to produce to install and release it is using the same technology velocities at home and ŵork available it need to be released, circulated and communicated, the space and times of technology communications to produce, is being itself as technology and markets, an space and time of mediated realities of technologies and markets, the activity of mediating values evolved in curatorial practices become technology mediated and this mediated mediation, ŵhich evolves to be and seems to be also, a recycling activity of contingencies productions, need to be seen according to hoŵ a mediated mediation evolves remediational processes which are first already evolved in mediation. 

  As soon as the activity of mediation of values evolves mediated mediations a mediational process becomes attentive to a remediational processes that is supposed for mediation to be a mediation and again and again be a mediated mediation that supposes already remediation to be mediation and to be remediational.  

  Under this media and technology mutations, a curatorial practice is being committed to define, conceptualize and redicuss a variety of concepts evolving the economy of such a process exchanges ŵith nears to be at the symbolic market not only an intellectual approach and a practical activity, but a merchant one, including media theory and technology, and also the relation betŵeen tacit spatiality’s, that of exhibiting and releasing, and technology spatiality’s, that of communicating, producing, marketing, approaching and reviewing, circulating. The relations betŵeen art, environment and technology, on the one hand, and art, technology and communities, including architecture, on the other hand, becomes a ŵhole field of explorations to a curator as creator subject in creativity that in paying attention to the formation of values curatorially practice the inevitably remediationality that mediation itself supposes in a social space defined by high advanced technologies as the internet which are at the same time already mediation and remediation’s of both realities, technologies of realities, realities as technologies and technologies as realities.  

  Mediation and remediation, hoŵever, as technology explicit supposes to be no only about or just regarded to curatorial endeavor in terms of mediating and or remediating art, but it can be also useful to understand direct technology and community issues including space and architecture as ŵell.

  Hoŵever, ŵe should remain attentive on ŵhat a curatorial practice is being and should be to be defined as something itself an nothing else and clear on the fact that any lost of such specificities means not curatorial practices itself. If ŵe stay ourselves thinking about it according to a one to one or a plus to plus relation between a curatorial text, which could be defined as a previous written doŵn statement, an approach, or something else  squetching it, and a mise in scene of it seen as the curatorial ŵay to unfold exhibits, yes an earlier definition of it ŵas from the very beginning related ŵith space, even certainly in the visual arts, particularly from the plastic arts, a curatorial practice is being defined since ever, visually, practically and in terms of the consistence of it by the activity of exhibiting at the art museum galleries and or the university campus galleries, the art center, etc, one, tŵo, or a series of art exhibits evolving single artists solo exhibitions, duos, group shoŵs or any other betŵeen the museographical genres as ŵell. 

  Like the old producer, as it ŵas during the posavantgard period, the curator helps to produce the exhibits making it possible exhibiting and releasing it to a public, but like the old art critic it is about overall selecting artists and artists ŵorks according to a curatorial statement that is going to be mise in scene, publically released and then also critically discussed, the relation betŵeen statements and space exhibiting selected artists and ŵorks is being here major to define curatorial practices.

 As a concept, in fact, the curator born in the art field, as a natural response to a progressive complejixation of the social, economic and public space of art in an age of generalized business, free markets, mass medias and high technologies. 

  It ŵas from a certain moment each time more complex to the old producer format, I am not including here to the moment the concept of the author as producer defined by Benjamin and rediscussed by Hall Foster, which is about hoŵ the single author himself or a single artist can become a self producer, but about the old producer as such a concept migrated from film and theater to the visual art, a guy or a girl ŵho is at the university art exhibits spaces committed to provide economic support and material necessities an exhibit needed to be done, displayed, installed, museographized, released, promoted and catalogue documented, it ŵas then progresibly complex to do all that as a producing activity without being also someone ŵho seduces ŵith motives, reason and attractive endeavors, even to get money in a competitive symbolic market that supposes not only merchants, but also a symbolic market of fashions and intellectual tendencies circulation. 

  Being, hoŵever, something relatibly if not certainly still young, a neŵ phenomena yet in the art field, ŵith just a few decades of genesis and evolution, the curator as a concept and practice, and curatorial practices as a field to be defined itself is being yet a field of explorations and critical analysis with a lot of creative surprises according to the cases modalities explored, including a progressive activity of artists practicing as curators to which I did lectured and conceptualized in 1994 my concept of the curator as creator to include both creative modalities of curatorial practices (the curator as a conjunction betŵeen old producer and old art critic), being or not the curator an artist, artist incusioning curatorial practices and even general creators such as philosophers for example exploring curatorial practices as Lyotard and Boudrillard did at art museums spaces. 

   So the curator born as both an intellectual and a practical conjunction in a person ŵho approaches not only a direct mise in scene of exhibits defined by complementary relations betŵeen written text discourses and single artists exhibiting visual discourses, but ŵho approach also intellectually parameters of production, discussing the modalities of production an experience need to be focused.

  As a further experience defined to be happen on next October an awareness and a conscience on such a subjective and objective realities of the art field I already extended on ŵas explicit in Marilyn explanations pointing outs on reasons and motivations to the experience to come, I am thinking here again about her accent on “exchanges” still seen as a merchant, economic kind, and “gifts” as a concept and a practique reality as ŵell, at least as I experienced it in the afternoon at the back yard second floor under the sky ŵith Marilyn, Dan and a groups of USA, Canadians and Cubans, including a Marilyn introductory explanation and a conversation, something I joined, as I ŵas coming back from the art university campus, ISA, which is on the other side of tŵon going home located crossing the street like 50 meter from the moll ŵe met.

  Hoŵever I ŵould also like to remain on hoŵ a remediational impetus, even if probably not accented or focused yet since the experience to come anticipates to explore neŵ formats, can be perceived to a certain point at Dan and Marilyn immediately previous experience from the moment they both presented and mediated not only artists direct presentations on their oŵn ŵorks, a format visually and mise in scene defined by a platform sited in front of the viewers chairs auditorium, ŵith tŵo chairs over and a table, as usually seen in television programs and an screen projection on the background as in movies and film auditoriums, but also curators explanations on their experiences, ŵith also like artists screen presenting it, so to a certain point mediating and presenting practices which ŵere previously presentation and mediations themselves. 

  Here to a certain point Marilyn and Dan previous experience explores ŵhat I ŵant to defined as a certain form of remediation in a format near to the idea of colloquiums or symposiums, according to an each by each one a time person or tŵo on top ŵhen partnerships, following a sequential each one to a next one succession by around 25 minutes in a three day program which also included our final sky occasion defined as a conversation workshop to discuss a further experience to come. 

   I specially become and feel motivated regarding art present previous Dan and Marilyn experience ŵith four artists, themselves Dan and Marylin as artists being doing all that as a remediational creative, a USA artist piece Marilyn presented The Shelter, (El Abrigo), consisting on a Shelter that ŵas sited informally exactly in front of me over an empty chair. In the beginning ŵhen I seen it I ŵas thinking about being probably a someone shelter near to come back, but then I seen Marilyn occasionally coming to see a kind of digital ŵatch, seen Marilyn I also recognized on a table several probably hotel, markets or tourists postcards ŵith as apparently commercial or standard image, the same shelter but being used by certain persons, one ŵho supposes to be the artist ŵho created it, but also people the artist invited to use it in a variety of locations, in a beach surrounded by a typical beach landscape, surfing, etc and ŵhen Marilyn formally presented it a guy from the public taked it over and used it as a dress and comes to the platform scene ŵith her.

  A second one a Canadian artist nears to be also of a lot of affinity to my current exhibit La Mismidad ŵere I am presenting my doŵntoŵ and community of Houston, also Berkeley Markets and Carnival, but it ŵas distinct because she presented not a city community but a letlee mountain unique community being at a natural park, and it ŵas simply fascinating the ŵay she explained the community, I liked specially her attitude proud to be ŵhile introducing it also visually ŵith a lot of photography’s, the main things, ”this is our churt”, she said, houses, architecture, “this is our main market”, she said, “here ŵe mainly buy our food”, and things like that, simply presenting it and also a guy artist from Florida ŵho presented his sculptures he defined as threshold sculptures.

Notes

  I want to express my thanks to Marilyn Volkaman for asking me to introduce myself and including me in the photo at the afternoon session of the workshop conversation developed at the second floor back yard under the sky at The Cockier industry Galpon. I also want to express my thanks to Solveig Font curator of the art gallery of The Cockier industry Galpon ŵho invited me to come in and come back on next morning to introduce Dan Paz and me both in between and marylin and me too, in occasion of Dan Paz and Marilyn previous experience Art Present, Mapping an Space that Could Return to earth again, The Cockier industry Galpon, June 2, 4, 6, 2015, City of Havana, Cuba. I placed it, the shelter postcards on my walls between many other things I have exhibited and near to my gulf coast anniversary magazine, Houston chronicle, photofest, my friend Terrell James 30 slides and diverse works Houston materials, their printed program is being around in my habitat. 

 I am very, extremely selective regarding quality ŵith best things I decide and consider to be introduced to my students and visitors. Art Present ŵas an experience done by Dan and Marilyn introducing and presenting a series of artists and curator to speak on themselves and included various lectures on topics such as Art, Technology and Digital Medias. By David Wolf, Chicago, at an spatial setting ŵhich included visual screen projections of fix photos and videos introduction and a program of several artists and curators visually illustrated. 

Material Biography: Certain Tamara arroyo Drawings and Installations

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Conceived, written and composed in 

English by Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Short Introduction 

  One of the main epistemes defined the avant-garde turn, that one of novelty –or the new--on the background of tradition, started with a substitution. Instead of mimetizing reality and or nature by illusions of its representations, meaning images which created the illusion of reality in representation a work of art should be open out to representing the perception of reality, instead of a perceived reality, the attention should be turned to perceptive perception itself. Impressionism started from there. 

  But as soon as turning to perceptive perception itself stablished, we discovered how a referential illusion stay yet at perception itself, even when we are now probably already not or less in front of represented, reference or denoted reality, the work still continues working between perception and reality or through perception in regard to the real.  

  In fact, the kid in question was not as much one about how the images of the referent effects at perception, but beyond that, perception as something itself.

  However, when perception moved to explore itself far to any referent, several paradoxes appeared. 

  On the one side, it was confined to a pure physical fact, the optical issue of the eye with its ocular figures and specular optical illusions. On the other side, if reference disappear or no longer work and perception stay with nothing to be perceived, it is confined to its own limits, if nothing is longer to be perceive, perception itself end to be diluted or death emplaced or replaced by aperptualism which evolves to be the inmediacy proximity of the body in the sensorial space ends substituted by abstraction. 

  On the first variable, a physical perceptive, optical pure, everything moved from special optical effects to “op art” and “cinetism”. On the second variable, a perception without nothing to be perceive but diluted at sensorial spaces immediacies, everything moved from subjectivity to fragments, (metonyms) and space proximity, (synesthesia’s). Instead of perception it derived in abstractionism, which claimed, like music did, nor only art dissolution through sprit and spiritual reality, but body abstractions of the senses in space, figures, surfaces, lines, geometries, backgrounds and analyses.  

Tamara Constancies: Toward an interstitial space Between the three ways

  Between both variables, however, a physical optical perceptive versus perception diluted in abstraction and subjectivity an additional one draws and appeared. Far to any descriptive referenciality, space proximity evolved to be also alive present inmediacy, it was then the body in space and a semantic memory of it, all moved then to be “materic art” and “body art”, reality appeared now as a collection of miniaturized clues the body cumulated in proximity. 

  The plastic work of Tamara Arroyo seems to be an exploration of new possibilities between such three variables getting original conjunctions and results in between. 

  Certainly, Beyond their differences, Op Artists and cinestists as well as abstractionist and materic Artists, they have all to work with form and matter and given that form and matter are nothing itself each one without the other, matter needing form to be matter and form matter to be form, only relations in between both stablish it including, of course, the structures and processes of such a relationship, and a work of art may be then created. 

  In fact Tamara has choiced to work with three concepts that no one of the three variables can’t elude, “Relations”, “structures” and “processes”. 

A Reticular Symbolism in front of the optical

  We are with Tamara art in front of an abstract reticular symbolisms of home, architecture and the urban something place her beyond cinetism given that reticula is not itself an optical effect control by an ocular illusion but a semantique film created with forms and plots interpose as a matter web between space and the visual. 

  As an objective form a reticular symbolize something between us and reality but not in the modes of something created between a perception perceiving and reference but as a glimpse of in between a materic web and spaces, it is like an unfolded texere (web) gives the impression of a glassened real whole. It is no the eye directly perceiving, but another Surface interposed and unfolded outside mediate between the eye and the ŵorld, it is a repetition that shows in front of the eye a way of seen extended in space as a reticulary form and matter, it offers a reading of seen, that eye itself can’t adventure, trip or journey.

  It is not then in Tamara Art neither the eye who perceives, neither a perceived image as two separated issues, neither the opposite like when perception and image unify as a real glassened, but an objective visual form space unforded and exteriorized outside, a symbolized plot proposes and or statement a way of seen, as a glimpse it evoques such a glassended image of reality. Instead of the eye gazing, such a reticular form extensión a physical gazing outsiding a visual Texere (web) free to symbolize, like tropes, but between matter and seen, it suggests an haz of relations discerns.

  Such an idea of an haz of relations discerns may be defined as major in Tamara art, through it, the artist weave like a weaver with fine minimalism, the plot or the web that texere and unify in her pieces the pure abstractions of forms, lines, surfaces, plots, matter and dots as relations of senses sinestesically communicating evoqued references. Reticulary symbolize seen but from a maximum spatial proximity disseminating the optical ocular and turning it to aptical and spatial sinesthesis, it is then the body relation with space and architecture, a visual symbolism retaining as a visible web the weave of a plot texere memory, relating visibles images with corporeal and spatial memory. 

Material Biography

  From such a way but not without majorly working with material biography resemantizations, she communicates a rich variety of senses, the immediate habitat, like the body relation with architecture, for example. Relations with immediate habitat such as home and domiciles spaces are here evoqued by simple structures sustained by foots suggesting through body and corporal memory things like tables, they are, however, at the same time, a same bidimensional plane extended as a free surface drawing in the space, something like a certain sinuous itinerary of a form in space tridimensionally abstract.

  Diluted any descriptive reference it also suggests to be then instead of home furniture’s and utensils, walls divisions in architecture, a wall separate’s an area from another one. 

  Its creative and inventive form and its letlee sides unfolds as a bidimensional symbolic form extensive in space an stuff that evoques a function, the functions of all that body collected clues alludes to home everyday life objects, elements, utensils and architectural functions, but that is however no longer a function, unprovided of it and resematized, suggesting by moments an ornamental design. I am thinking here about Structures IV, 2017

  Far to be denoted, reflected or represented references, the referential horizont appear here like semantique clues inscribed and transported in matter and form. It seems to be all about a semantique memory of form and matter seen from the body and I would like to define such a memory with the concept of material biography, a biography of the material itself, communicates resonances of urban memory.

  Her forms, for example, suggest a certain kind of modular structures fould and unfolds relatibly standards proliferated today at home with the designs of Ikea, a hollister corporative shopping mol, something called my attention since I see Structure IV and I late confirm seen her pieces Intervened Tender and her beautiful and subtly drawings on Ikea fabrics as well.

  This fact, her allusions semantically to city and urban resonances with drawing elements based in iron material and colors such as black, gold, red, polietileno and plastics relates her drawings and structures with forms to a certain point already fund in the social world. 

  This is something place her inside contemporary neoplasticism which as one of it main attentions explores the possibilities of an ultraneoplasticity, allusive to how polietineo as matter is today everywhere generalized in the modern consistency of the urban worlds materials as a way to also unsaturates plastics arts from the saturated situation textualism and intertextualism created consumed by postmodern figures as remedo, pastiches and parodies. 

  She creates symbolic figures that in the manner of home unfolded furniture’s but unprovided from it usual functions alludes to home and the architectural space, tenderer, oven, windows, plastic bags, home and offices curtains or Lattice windows like Venetian blinds. To her grand Tamara winner at Bilbao, for example, she recycled and created with plastic boxed collected at La Rivera Bilbao Markets, like a reticular tamiz or walls that funtioned as Lattice windows or Venetian blinds both made as an intervention there, at the Bibao Market and late explored to be bidimensional pieces on paper cutting the boxes and exploring the plastic plots potential of it to do both colour photography’s of it and collages, she also covered with glass plastic bags in a form that looks to be glassened ingravid presences suggesting or remaining the fast sensations of going to shop or doing market.

  A certain neoromaticism of the urban and of everyday life in our denses and big modern metropolis may be feel at Tamara art something that can be keep out as a major characteristic of our generation, making a sublime of the quotidian, apparently ordinary. 

  An interstitial and liminal move from the sensible beyond perception toward a return to contemplation is supposed to be pivotal here, it fares from the sign and icon prevalence postmodernism and pop art at the end of the past century even when certainly, while hardly seen and strongly resemantized from the subtly biography of the materials, an attention to the homogeneity of the standard culture of consume and mass culture is developed yet in Tamara art.

Confines of Neominimalism

  The neominimalism of Tamara drawings lines, relations and structures in processes suggest to maintain a certain ambiguity letting it open to viewers the fact that her pieces while being forms merged as expressions of her interior ŵorld, her being, soul and spiritual universe, also merged as something fund in the social world.

  What we are committed here to stand is about the confines of neominimalism. 

  While as plastic artist formed at fine and high art she works with fine minimalism as a weaver who weave her web and texere, she also procedure at certain pieces like an Ikea designer providing to some of her pieces the same kind of consistency, homogeneity and appearance. 

  She extension a plastic, visual and symbolic discourse that open the relation between art and design as a feel of explorations. This is something that keep her art to be a work of attitude and can be perceive in several of her more simples and beautiful geometric forms of iron like for example Relations 2016 or Structures II, the first one alluding to 13 windows pieces, the second one to ornamental iron forms inspired by collected images of houses iron ornamentals. 

  Utilitarian designers from corporate shopping’s mols as Ikea are creating today, certainly, useful and utilitarian modular standards forms relatibly like minimals and Tamara as a fine and high neominimalist artists is being reusing and resemantizing something of it to a certain subtly level letting it to be feel as clues through resemantizations of the materials biography. 

  Working with the inscribed semantique memory of matter she resematize extending the possibilities to create new senses and bring a new light on home, quotidians and the urban.

  In some of her recent pieces she has Projected, Tamara is reinventing in ways that similarly to my previous explained relation Between neominimalism and corporate shopping mol as Ikea, but this time toward a more extended concept of inventive visual culture, suggest now to be like how the culture of generalized consumer is being reinventing the quotidian, something currently happening nor only in architecture but at cucking and fashion aesthetics. I am thinking here about her piece 2 and 3, by now just project drawings of future pieces, when she is anticipating to do, inspired by iron ornamentals, additions of ceramic elements of colours and slabones of ceramics unprovided of its functions an appearance to be decoratives

Toward a Sensible Abstraction: Time, Space and Being between Lines, Surfaces and dots

  “Relations”, “structures” and “processes”, the concepts Tamara has choiced to work with, are themselves abstract concepts. 

  Sush a purity of abstraction realizes in Tamara through surfaces, lines and the dots that lines supposes and this is something relates her pieces with two main concepts, space and time.  

  On the one side a line supposes two extreme dots, the one started it and the one ending it as well as several dots in between, while a dot alone abstracted like the line in a Surface, stablishes a sense of a site or a place spatially seen, the one such a dot supposes to be.

  But as soon as a new dot appear a first imaginary line begging in between and from the moment the line start to move the dot of a now and the following dots of further now’s, transform it, like the line journey as well, in a dot of time, it turn then paradoxically to be now, the same dot and line, nor a place or a site, but the opposite, a non place and a non site. 

  Through this way Tamara pieces plays and suggest to be an exploration in between place and non place, site and unsite but seen as an space and time relation. 

  If the line free in surface a dot may be a place, but if there is no longer lines and dots in a surface, it is not space yet, instead it’s an infinite becoming of being in time, it is time, only when line and dots appears a surface turn to be space while only a surface transform, paradoxically, lines and dots in space, without a surface lines and dot are time.

   Tamara “processes” and “relations” needed of time and structures are formed by surfaces, lines and dots. All this is being clearly evoqued and suggested at her recent piece’s basis majorly in relations between lines and surfaces. Surfaces creates lines and lines dots, while lines and lines dots creates surfaces, a mutual production appear at this point as a self-production which may be seen also as a production of the self and it works as a symbolism of space and time.

  But given that it is impossible for time and space to be observed without contemplation and contemplation itself is a form of the sensibility, Tamara recent art can be read as a sensible abstractionism of space and time evoquing a being relations in processes abstracted in lines and surfaces, she is exploring the affective relational of forms. Her windows and colour pencil drawings explicit an abstractionism that remember Mondrian who from De stil proclaimed a dissolution of art in the spirit and spiritual reality.

Discussed Works

Tamara Arroyo, Structures IV, 2017, view of Promotora exhibit at Can Felipa gallery, 

black painted iron, variable sides

Tamara Arroyo, Structures IV, 2017, black painted iron, variable sides 

Tamara Arroyo, Intervened clothes, painted iron, from relations serie

2016 

Tamara Arroyo, Relations, 2016, Cutted Ikea Fabrics

Tamara Arroyo, Celocias, 2016, intervention made at the Bilbao Rivera market, deconstructed plastic market boxes

Tamara Arroyo, Relation’s 2016, expo Quotidian Geometries, Addaya Gallery, Centre d Art Contemporani, thirsting iron black, gold and bronze painted

Tamara Arroyo, Structures II, three black, gold and cobre painted iron pieces, Bilbao Art open doors, 2017 

Tamara Arroyo, Pieces 2, drawings inspired in ornaments from a variety of cerrajerías to add to it ceramic color elements

Tamara Arroyo, Pieces 3, ceramic pieces lost their functions transformed in decorative elements

Tamara Arroyo, Recreations of Plastic Bags, Made with glasses, Mava, The Glasses Museum of the Madrid Community

Tamara Arroyo, S/t, Seven color photography’s on Hahnemuler paper, 2016

Tamara Arroyo, S/t, Collage of plastic market boxes framed as bidimensional pieces, Exhibit the Interrupted Line: Tamara Arroyo and Jimena Kato, La Havana, 2017

References

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, The Liminals, paper, pp, Aesthetic and time, Selected Essays

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, The Interstitials, paper, pp, Aesthetic and Time, Selected Essays

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Aesthetic and Time, Pp, Aesthetic and Time, Selected Essays

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Hermeneutic and Axiology, paper, Pp, The Subject in Creativity, Book, Complete Works

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, The Anobjectual Object, paper, Pp, The Subject in Creativity, Book, Complete Works

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, The Crisalide of Being, paper, Pp, The Intramundane Horizont, Book, Complete Works

Jacques Derrida, La Forma y el Querer Decir, notas sobre la Fenomenología del Lenguaje: Hurssel, Catedra, 1989, Librero Privado 

Jacques Derrida, Form and Wishes to Say, notes on the phenomenology of language, The University of Chicago Press

Hegel, Forma y Materia, Pp, Ciencia de la Lógica, tomo II, Hachete

Hegel, Form and Matte, Pp, Science of Logic, tome II

Michael de Certaud, The Practice of Every Day Life, The University of California Press, 1999

Another Folds of the Soul: Tamara Arroyo

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Written in english by Abdel Hernandez San Juan

  Recognized since ancients and classics to current moderns philosophy and the arts, a negation of the soul is yet unknown.  

  While almost everyone coincident to recognize the Leibniz monad as the only one concept that fullfully embody the soul, there is also a lot of efforts to express the soul by images.   

  Within one of his best passages on Leibniz and the Baroque Gilles Deleuze compared the soul with an interior grand piano when inside policromized woods the sound acoustically echoes, and in the same passage he uses the image of a window near to the sealing in a chapel or a church when we can far perceive the light coming from outside to inside transformed into colour by the window glasses.  

  By this two Deleuze passages the soul images looks to be evoqued rather than represented since the soul seems to be irreducible to representation itself. 

  As a concept and a sensible dimension of the senses the soul results to be inapprehensible from all its sides and by that reason unrepresentable, something relates the soul impressions to the Inmaterials and/or demattered, but given that the soul also suggest feelings of being real states, it is also a sublime dimension of sensibility. While inapprehensible by an image capability to visually embody it, the soul also nears to be seen as incorporeal or as the otherness of the body, toward the spiritual. 

  By this reason the soul suggests figures that opposites anything which like bodies can be delined, environs or outline cutted as corpus or coupures. 

  In fact, since it can’t be a corpus defined within an area, a zone, a plane or a cutted space it seems to be infinity by all its sides while at the same time only inside a monad related to the body as “the single one of each one” versus the multiple, the sensation of the soul can be feel and perceived. 

  Certainly everyone feels his soul, paradoxically, only inside himself body. 

   Such an ambivalent oscillation of the soul between something without a body or corpus like an inapprehensible immaterial or intangibility and the paradox by which the soul can only be feel by each one being inside the single one body near to remember the status of surfaces at the philosophy of forms since only a surface can really be infinity gazed from the all sides without a body and be at the same time a tangible dimension. 

  According to this logic of surfaces a living room in an architectural whole seems to follows a similar principle regarded to geometry, when a room appears to be to the  impressions something like to double, to fold or to bend a same surface creating contiguous spaces making rooms, inside and nor insides, outsides to such insides and then insides to other outsides. Like in the pure abstractions of the soul, space appears here as a same and unique surface that angle and double creating contiguous spaces, it is a kind of Fold and a fold itself, in fact, consist about in a same surface folding that distributes light on one side and shadow in the other so that a fabric of folds or a linen sheet of folds’ impressions here another folds of the soul.

  I will then statement here that a significant part of Tamara Arroyo art can be read as visual explorations and images of the soul sublimes, complex and rich forms to evoque it, I am mainly thinking here about pieces such as Structure IV I already discussed from other perspectives but I also want to show how it prevalence around almost all Tamara art and mostly at her earliers. While Structure IV itself appears like an extended bidimensional surface to the space in a form I defined like bidimensional beings, there is also visually folds in Tamara IKEA cloth and more precisely in Tamara white ceramics defined to be white folds over iron surrounds.

  And this reading brings me to Tamara earlier previous art when the soul as an issue was stronger than currently.

  Richer than a surface since the soul additionally evolve the relation between an inside and an outside, it is to each one being an absolute inside, the interior of the single one being body, but it is also something that overflows it and looks to be then over outsides, outsides however that still regarded to the soul stay to be again an inside. Tamara earlier art can be then discussed as rich explorations of this dimension of the inside and the outside immersed at the intimacy interior of being and then to the relations of such an inside with its outsides. 

  I am mostly thinking here about Tamara earlier pieces of drawings with black lines on white surfaces when she choiced real objective empty white rooms in architecture to draw and reproduce fullfully on the walls the fine drawings of all domestic objects and elements usually surround and environment an everyday life quotidian habitat such like chairs, tables and letlee furniture’s at home. 

  There is nothing more an inside as space to the spiritual feelings of being than the intimacy of habitat when she sometimes also included herself visual presence on a chair with her hair covering her face or thinking at the living room. 

  The principles of the black line suggest the interior of the house like the inside respect to the outside. 

  In this pieces the environment of life in the house expresses the interior space in a mode that is the same one or similar to the sensations of the soul as an absolute inside to the body interior. From another perspective, elements of the quotidian life extend from her interior ŵorld to exit now from that interior to those space when the inside and the outside communicates in between, the last one always seen from the inside. 

  Her window series is an example of the above specially at the beginning when she draws it with black line on empty white rooms but also when she extended it to tridimensional windows on woods, the window itself symbolize our gazing to the outside from inside, through a window we seen the seen the window propose as frame and through a window the light entrance to the room distributing together with our impressions and sensations of intimacy life, the visible between light and shadow, also air and weather goes to inside through mainly windows. 

  Through windows a being locates an exteriorized and objective form that like the eye from the body looks out, it is the window itself as a frame proposal of seen. It is the same principle that organize the relation between the body as an inside recipient to being and its outsides visualized out, the window as symbol. Thanks to a window we seen in the gaze beyond the domestic space to the city, it symbolizes in the gaze all we seen and feel from inside around.

  This relation between insides and outsides acquired also a form at Tamara London piece when a black line exit to draw spaces internal to the externals and externals to the internals when what is interior and what’s is exterior exchange, the interior can be exterior to another interior and the exterior interior to another exterior. Beyond the relation house/inside/home/habitat/soul now we also have elements of architecture symbolizing such an exchange as an stair.  

  It is no longer in Tamara earlier drawings pieces with black lines a material biography as I earlier proposed to discuss this concept about Tamara current iron neominimalist works. 

  While in her current art she explores the semantic resonances of the referent or the sensorial proximity aperceptual memory of the body disseminating the referent like letlee clues, our body memories of a foots for example, or a certain form to do a bidimensional Surface place and non place, the social origin we recognize to a certain kind of iron as a urban or social Biography, a kind of Venice lattice window or decorative figure we remember from the city architectures designs, a plastic or a glass materials as remembered in habitats, objects, markets or urban spaces, the sensation of division between areas in the house by a certain structure, ornaments, curtains, furniture’s, etc, in her earlier black lines drawings she instead afforded real spaces of habitat as sublime spaces, it was then beyond metonyms when by letlee fragments we can get a sense of an evoqued but not represented whole, in her earlier pieces the real spaces of habitats at home and domestic space was directly afforded by the line figuratives. 

  The relation with an intimacy memory even familiar seems to be pivotal or major in that earliers something clear at her pencil drawings recreating by imagination her impressions of architecture during her Roma grand, like for example her imagination on the houses her mom and dad live in Italy or her memories of the family cars. 

  A synchronic spatiality of the process regarding everyday life seems to be also major in Tamara nor only at her notes Books of drawings but at the methodology of her work in general something that reference her art to a processual time relevant in three ways, aleatorism at the creative process, the way she relates to architecture and the ways she relates to art as institution. I am mostly thinking here regarding the aleatorials in Tamara relational compositions at Bilbao during her Bilbao grand when she stablished a variety of relations proposals between the same elements to do letlee exhibits at her Bilbao studio space such like the plastic boxes markets reticulars, the Venice lattice windows, the ikea cloths, fabric waves, ornaments or letlee woods getting it in several different forms between flour and walls, something she earlier explored in a form less elaborated as interventions with fabrics in spaces.

  Aleatorism, however, a concept that remember the work of John Cage an artist related with music is less present in her recent art such like Structures IV and some other based in iron. 

  Such a synchronic spatiality of the process addressing the continuum of life also major the ways she relates to architecture as we should not forget that almost all the figurative motives she is currently exploring with neominimalist iron are inspired by and sometimes directly referent to such figures in city architectural ornamentals like used iron at windows, columns, doors designs, external back yards or courts. Certainly she walk a way through the city making photography’s of architecture something starting a new moment of an investigation on architecture that she earlier begging now addressed to her thesis, the methodological issues I refers before.  

  Concrete practiced to her recent iron pieces and anticipated to her thesis preparation her reading of architecture, however, even when exteriorized as an objective photographic research with her accent on the relation body-city, stay to be an approaching of everyday life in a sense of synchronic processual temporality and we should point out a distinction or a difference between this here and now of the time passing and extrinseque mixtures of codes of the usual postmodernist parameters in architecture when even beyond Ventury, postmodern architecture in general tend to mix forms seen as pregiven by diachronically periodized styles clichés and this supposes different ways to afford culturalism. 

  While the usual, more typical postmodern parameters in architecture assumed to stands forms as cloused by a diachronic historicity of it which first periodized it and late mixed it as an mixation of externals inscribed clichés when culture is recognized by styles and genres inscribed codes in forms, this more synchronic way to assume everyday life supposes therapeutic processes of continuums life when culture is recognized by open becomings, an endogenous relation between the body and habitat, processes in formation and alosemiotic transformations of culture. 

  This difference if we consider the eclecticism results of postmodernism in architecture can remember the differences between baroque and rococo in the XVIII century and is related with a tend to mix external codes like ingredients are mixed for example in a genere of albums in music defined as pupurri, when contraposed ritms of completely different genres are mixed together. 

  Today, however, after all, the ways to define ourselves as avant-gardists to postmodernism are again a form of commentaries, like it was during the first avant-garde ways to let know how to be related with cultural modernism.

  A good example can be here the good jazzist musician who show to us inside his jazz pieces everything he want to let know to us on other genres such as rock, bolero or son from his jazz piece as forms of comments.  

  Finally, this synchronicity seems to also be major to approach how Tamara affords art as institution something about which I would like to choice to reference an specific of her pieces on this issue when she presented the drawings of the interior architectural halls spaces in perspectives of an artistic institution in Madrid created thanks to the previous formation of a bank its capital was earlier created by emigrants with the sales of their bodies and life objects, something Tamara suggested by drawings the inventary of such objects collected in a wood piece of furniture just like those specialized to the conservation of collections. 

Discussed Works

Tamara Arroyo, Structures IV

Tamara Arroyo, Dibujos en Líneas negras del espacio de habitad, muebles, elementos, objetos que reproducen el espacio interior de habitad en habitación blanca

Tamara Arroyo, Dibujos en Líneas negras del espacio de habitad, muebles, elementos, objetos que reproducen el espacio interior de habitad en habitación blanca con foto sentada en la silla en habitación contigua

Tamara Arroyo, Dibujos en Líneas negras del espacio de habitad, muebles, elementos, objetos que reproducen el espacio interior de habitad en habitación blanca con foto acostada en el sofa

Tamara Arroyo, Primeros Dibujos en Líneas negras de ventanas en espacios-habitaciones blancas vacías

Tamara Arroyo, Mejor vista de Ventanas llevadas a tridimension

Tamara Arroyo, Dibujos en Líneas negras de escalera, London 

Tamara Arroyo, Dibujos, Casas Imaginadas de la Familia, Roma

Tamara Arroyo, Dibujos, Memorias de Automóviles, Roma 

Tamara Arroyo, Selección de piezas desarrolladas como pequeñas exposiciones en el studio en Bilbao, Instalaciones en el estudio con elementos en la pared y en el piso, Tela de IKEA, Cenefa, Celosías, Maderas

Tamara Arroyo, Piezas anteproyectadas de vaciados de Pliegues en yeso

Tamara Arroyo, Relación a Arquitectura, Estructuras en Proceso, vista de la instalación en la feria set up en Bologna, barras de hierro y barras de hierro calibradas curvadas

Tamara Arroyo, Relación a Arquitectura, Discutidas en el otro ensayo previo

Tamara Arroyo, Obra dibujo de la institución y mueble con los objetos envueltos

References

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Material Biography: Some Tamara Arroyo Drawings and Installations

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, The Intramundane Horizont, Pp, The Intramundane Horizont

Gilles Deleuze, El Pliegue: Leibniz y el Barroco

Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, The University of Minnesota Press

Weaves: Aleatorials

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Coming from the very fine art side of the high arts at the complutence university of Madrid Artist from Spain Tamara Arroyo, moving her attention to deconstructed plots of markets plastic boxes transformed into reticulary tridimentional ways of gaze, seen and eye architecture and surroundings, is exploring the possibilities of aleatorials.

  Including bidimensional recreations of it through photography of the boxes matter collages, fine black lines compositions of creative and inventive bidimensional forms in the space from drawings on walls suggesting everyday life domestic objects to tridimensionally extended forms symbolizing home furniture’s and architectural designs, her exhibits prospect to mainly basis in aleatorials to create and compose as to research developing something that started to major since her studio short exhibits compositions at Bilbao, now developed as a full one-month solo show by first time. 

  Speaking on gaze, seen, markets, architectural and the urban, her exhibit focus around forms between beauty ends and matter clues memories of its previous useful ends and creates as whole a rich exploration of the relations between matters and forms within amazing drawings and space installations including fabrics, clouds, woods and architectural ornamental forms as celosias, cenefas and a variety of rich motives collected and research by Tamara from her everyday quotidian life city photography’s. 

  Moving her attention to urban sensibility phenomena’s, since recent years he is being encrecently exploring weaves in a sense that seems to offers researches between various matters and inmaterial entwining’s resonances of urban culture. Committed herself to textiles weaves, she learned and study, through her pieces, composed by new bidimensional pieces of paper and textile, revisiting the tradition of weaves, her own personal way to process, assimilate and recreate it, Tamara started to text her fine art moving from standard neoplastics to new materials getting an amazing fine art original drawings of earth and visual culture embody inmaterial and spiritual soul qualities around the quotidian. 

Everyday life Habitat: Tamara Arroyo

Tamara Arroyo previous black lines drawings on insides empty home rooms reproduced fullfully the objects and furniture’s of everyday life Habitat and life domestic environments when she extended it to also gazing’s of the outsides from insides through black lining drawings of windows exchanging sensations of the inside and the outside at or her black lines drawings of stairs in London, 

  Currently one of the most visible, original and amazing young artist from the current Spain young art scene and coming from the very fine art side of the complutence university of Madrid, artist from Spain Tamara Arroyo, participated in several pivotal collective art exhibits such as Promotora show at Can Felipa Gallery, Barcelona, the Set Up feria, Bologna, Quotidian Geometries at addaya gallery Centre of Contemporary Art, The Open doors joining Bilbao Art 2017, The Studio House the Village Street and winner several grands such as the Bilbao Grand, the Roma grand in Italy and prizes from the Madrid community and the Madrid Museum of Glass between several others.

Gesture/text: An Hermeneutical approach to Vincench

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

     A certain part of Jose angel Vincench visual art can be readen from the perspective of gesture and inscription relationships, on the one hand, gesture and writing, on the other, rituality and analysis, abstraction and text; concepts that seems to be antinomies while exposed in his work to a permanent dialogue and exploration; it is about relations of mutual necessity and paradoxically of mutual exclusion between pairs

  A gesture is ephemeral, spontaneous, evanescent, its fixation remains contradictory to its own nature.

   I am thinking here about pieces developed as inscripturalized fixations of spontaneous gestures when the image of “dripping” looks to be constrained by the cold image of spontaneous gestures gazed as inscription in his “Paintings of action”, a serie made sometimes in silver, occasionally in gold or even in black, when the dramaturgical effect in semantical terms, relations of sense, mainly focus on the contrast between a gesture and its inscription. Any gesture, in fact, a soon as we see to it as a denotation sign, a clues or an indicial sign end to be a gesture itself to become an inscription or a memory of it.

  I am also thinking in his serie “From the interior of the earth” which also mostly goes around gestures but in another form related with stein, in this case we always have the entrance on canvas of hand writing when the moment gesture/writing seem and appear as semantically pivotal in the production of sense. Certainly, all the unusual distributed objects communicating the interior of the earth with the outside external weather surface are classified with dates and hours in this paintings as well as we can perceive scriptural vestiges or reminiscences behind layers of gestures in the background. 

   In some of the paintings we can directly read sentences intersected at several levels as readable contents but there is one major between the serie, a piece in which now there is no writing as much but more directly an almost emblematic sign or icon of a text, like saying, “this is a text”, the printing image in two diagramed columns of a text of paragraphs 

  This piece is an emblematic icon of palimpsests

  I don’t remember a better solutioned visual balance of such an autonomic pair as gesture/text as in this painting, nor a better harmonized visual approach to palimpsests juxtaposition of spatial and temporal distinct codes in a new whole as in this piece; it is about a memory that includes behind the symbolic image of a grave

   I understand here the concept of antinomies in a Kantian sense, Kantian antinomies focused on paradoxes, for example,  what is first a simple element or a composed whole?, if we think about simple elements we will ever imagine an addition of an added contiguous list of plus to plus linear elements then we imagine that simple elements are originated firsts, but through such a contiguous addition there is no relation between elements, only a sequence of plus, to be related in between, a composed whole is needed, then we realize the opposite that composition is first than elements, two contradictory affirmations on a same issue appear as autonomic

  Vincench art seems to be a way of working with such antonymic poles by exploring the complexities of it both relations and separations, mutual necessity and mutual exclusions in between, probably the reason to understand why his art moves within an image of rituality, gesture and spontaneity on the one side and an image of ascetic circumspection, minimalism, design and conceptuals under a controlled economy of elements 

     I am regarding in this sense nor only his more obvious works related with ritual from 95 to 2002 when the issue of ritual was the theme of various pieces some times in a religious sense, but also about his current neogeometrical abstractions made in gold as well as a current work focused in a more delimited idea of concept were we can even speak about the visual image of concept sometimes through pieces composed only by texts and writings without visual icons and sometimes composed by the visual concept of text 

   Similarly to the use of text at “From the interior of the earth” there is a current piece in which again we have the visual image that can be considered an emblematic icon of a text, the two columns distributed and diagramed paragraphs in printed typographies but now without nothing to be read there, it is now all painted in gold as an unreadable abstraction. The effect of this communicates a sensoriality or a sensorialization of the text, something also visible in another piece composed by an unreadable text of paragraphs while in this case not completely erased as in the gold one, but confused or effaced as a consequence of the juxtaposition of several different texts, in both cases the text seems to be read and perceived throught their margins, the white page space in between words and between the pattern of text and the page margins, a kind of refiguration of the text by silence, pauses and white spaces as if an overflowing of the margins on the text 

  This is something that remember Cage accents on silence and or on not sound over sound as well as Barthes clamming’s of the pleasure of the text, while there is in it also evolved another antinomy, that one between the conceptual and the abstract

   Concepts are out of doubt abstracts but they are also paradoxically at the same time full of meanings, contents, sense, discourse and enuntiations, while abstraction is far to content in favor of pure form being in that sense antonymic to concept throught the relation between form and contents. If it is completely abstract then it is pure form far to the meanings that a concept, even being abstract, evolve.

   Although abstract itself here the concept seems to be diluted in form but nor without at the same time be disseminated or redistributed in the sensoriality of forms as if atomizing it within multiple diminute grains meeting it already disseminated with a more semantic sense of content understanded as open atmospheres of senses and less as something well delimited or cutted around concrete concepts as it was in his previous more ritual works. This is by instance a meeting again with rituality now in a more minimalistic sense out or less related with culturalized or religious contents.

      In this sense we can interpret some of his pieces from the paradoxical relation between nature and culture as a continuity-discontinuity phenomenon, when the pure state of nature and the state of culture seems to be both united and separated. I am thinking here again about “From the interior of the earth”, all of this piece, in fact, are at the end landscapes and the distribution of rare objects over the earth surface suggest the possibility of moving out to the surface an interior earth sound

   Derrida sustained that speaking as a phonetic act can be considered the first and more near to nature form of social institution. Certainly, on the one hand, speaking made the transmission of langue possible which is itself an inscribed tradition, but on the other hand, speaking can be also seen as the first transformation of an unarticulated natural sound such as onomatopeyic pronunciations, laughter and shouts in articulated words, so that the first fould between nature and culture is originated in speach, we have yet a preservation in this first fould of the state of nature under culture but upside down, when state of nature and state of culture are both united and separated

   Is ultimately Vincench claiming a primigeneus sense of silence ancient and or originary than speech? or it is all again about nonverbal silence as suggested in his piece “The fish die from the mouse”? or yet about again the primacy of margins white pages and pauses as usually excluded from the text but that usually surrounds it given to it its exterior consistency and definition now overflowed over the text to assume it’s all space erasing contents and transforming the text in the space of pure abstract sensoriality?, I think it is mainly about gest and sensorialities

      In fact, there are many pieces from the past in which gest was not yet seen by inscription nor statified by the cold image of inscribed dissection, as for example his “Symbolic clues” defined as a kind of weaves of a kind of folk, it is also clear in “The departure” as well as in “To go and pick up my naked image” and in “To go and pick up my fiction”.

    “From the interior of the earth” are also gesturals with the entrance of hand gestural writing on canvases, the attention to the antinomies of gesture and inscription started from the serie “Paintings of action”

   I see three moments in Vincench art definition of its own language and style, on the one hand the “Symbolic clues”, “From resistance to folklore”, “research and market”, it was the exploration of a kind of visual folk defined by the relation between the hands made identity of the finger clues creating with the repetition of it a kind of wave of finger clues as if an artesany from tradition evoquing to me identities in formation, on the second hand “From the interior of the earth” explores memory in a way that subtly remember kieffer, this are pieces based in layers plastic densities and ductility in which gesture mix with writing, text and the image of time through landscapes, and finally his recent neogeometric abstractions in gold such as “Statistics”, “Inercy” and “Painting of actions” including the bricks.

 There is also an interesting symbolic relation between text and death which can be perceived in one of the pieces of “From the interior of the earth” serie when the image of graves appears behind the emblematic icon of columns of text in the backgrounds

   According to Derrida analysis of sign in Hegel, the sign itself is related with death as obvious in Egyptian pyramids inscriptions on stones, however it is not as much sign itself considered as one by one single elements which connect with the symbolism of death but more directly the idea of text, in fact, through the sign seem from writing, we still have the vestiges, reminiscences and clues of alive speech act, a succession of signs looking at a text read as writing are yet connected or related with the gestural performance that made it, writing itself can still be defined as  a performance less ritual than speech act synchronicity relation with an immediate audience and the constant presence of others proximity, situational communication and senses

     Although more lineal and sequential than speach, there is yet however in writing something of the gesture that made it, it is true that in writing we have the lost or the lack of the face to face relations, it is in a certain sense the beginning of isolation when the audience is substituted by an imagined other which in language work as an interpretant, it is a send to someone we don’t know as well as something cutted from contexts toward transportation, but even considered as a such proffered phenomenon, we still have in writing something of the soul of alive speech at least through sense and meanings, the symbolic relation with death seems then to be more related with writing considered as a text and the signs seen textuality, while, we always have the possibility to revert that logic by using the textual conscience or awareness of inscription to gaze back the non-textual textually in a form that works out of inscriptural death

      This is pivotal from the moment we realize the major place that single words play in Vincench art, a single word in fact is directly related with speach act and symbolize it, in speaking we never compose words from the sense of a whole, only in writing composition we subordinate single words to the circulation of grammatical forms when words are just diminute elements of a general sense, only in speach act each single word consérvate their relevance, most of the Vincench work as notably obvious are base around one by one words and we should also consider that the african religions alluded in several of his earlier works with regards such as ifa,  Regla de ocha are mainly dependent of speech memory to its social reproduction

  We should pay attention for example to how sentences entrance and itinerate through the canvas in “The symbolic clues” series

   Now back to recent abstractions, 

   Besides the relation between abstraction and concept may also be interpreted here from the perspective of twenty century abstractionism by examining its coincidences as well as differences given the notorious recent turn of his art to abstractionism

   Abstraction appeared in art as a reaction to representation. Representation afforded reality through perceptive and illusionist mimesis and reflects, but as soon as many concepts of realism are themselves autonomics in the ways to assume the relation between language and reality, abstraction reacted as another way far from representation and instead turned to the interiority of abstracted subjectivity, its principles in sensibility, perception and the spirit, exploring desfamiliarization and extracotidianization of mundane quotidian or familiars on the opposite side of routine, it was also nearly related with looking for a form of visual sign which like in music and architecture is not needed and or depending of representing reality

  Vincench abstractionism are of a  neo-geometric kind, the idea of surface and arithmetic planes play a forefront role in it but at the same time according to the priorized symbolism of colour something that remember Malevich suprematism more than the geometrical abstraction of Mondrian and still or the expressionist one of Klee and Kandinsky, the second one kind of abstractionism focused in the abstract relation between rationality and spirit, and the thirst one in the interior states of subjectivity and the I, while the first attributed logical connotations of concepts inside perception attributing conceptual meanings to colour as in white on white or black on white. 

  In fact, such an attitude of developing an abstraction in which the colour is always the same one is directly related to Malevich far to the aleatorism and fractality that abstraction finded within abstract informalism. The relation with Malevich is also obvious and explicit in the way abstract reflection meet with religion, the gold as used by Vincench, in fact, is generally used in architectural decorations of churches and in the techniques of making cristian religious icons

   There is by the way a point of relation between abstraction and concept, both are referred to an abstracted idea of the spirit in its own interiority, both are related with taking distance to the physical world from the dematerialization and inmaterialization of the abstracted states of conscience, awareness, subjectivity and the I, in that sense concept and abstraction are complimentary just like red and green, blue and orange are in the universe of colour, however, at the same time, both are paradoxically autonomics, abstraction is pure form, concept is sense, semantique and content even when this contents are abstracts versus representational. 

   The relation with the object is also different in between both, a concept is an abstract representation of an object in the subject, abstraction means in the opposite way the disolvences of subject and object, when it is abstract it is paradoxically concrete because it is nor other thing than object itself in all its sensorial proximity, abstraction is always surface, proximity, the object is diluted in the subject and subjectivity diluted in the object, the conceptual in reverse, is defined by the well contrasted relation between subject and object even when in an abstract nonrepresentational manner. 

   I don’t remember in Cuban abstractionism a neosuprematic case as in Vincench, the only reference can be a certain sense that abstraction acquired between some of us in the second half of the eighties when we conceived the exhibit of abstract art as an attitude response to the sociocultural moment, an exhibit which was never made because the suspicious of the institutions something about which Desiderio following us with a same attitude ironically published at la gazeta magazine his text “recently concluded the abstract art exhibit”, an empty text, without writing, text or contents, with only dots suspended as flouting in the white empty page with footnotes as if

References

Derrida Jacques, El Pozo y la pirámide: Introduction a la semiología de Hegel, márgenes de la filosofía, catedra, also in Margins of Philosophy, the university of chicago press

General Bibliography

Barthes, Roland The Responsibility of Forms, Essays on Music, Art and Representation, The University of California Press

Eco umberto, la estructura ausente, lumen

Eugenio quetzil Castañeda, Eugenio quetzil castañeda, https://www.academia.edu/81422165/The_Invisible_Theatre_of_Ethnography_Performative_Principles_of_Fieldwork

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, 1996- Beyond the Intertextual. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Conference Lectured at the Fondren Library Lectures Auditorium as a guest of the faculty of classical and Hispanic studies in his area of research of semiotic, theory of art, anthropology, curator at the alejandro otero museum of visual art, coordinated by Surpik Angelini and Hector Urrutibeity, translated by Graciela daichman, 45 minutos version of a paper The posmodern work. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, translated by Gabriel, translations coordinated by surpik angelini and transart Foundation, Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, 1998- Cultural Bodies. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, published catalogue, english, translated by Cristina jadick, Sicardi Gallery, also pyblished at https://www.mariacristinajadick.com

Houston, Texas, USA

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, 1998- Bodies Echoes. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, published catalogue, Sicardi Gallery, english, translated by Lourdes, Houston, Texas, USA

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, 1998- Anglo-Saxon conceptualism. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, lecture discussed at the glassel Schóol of art, cátedra of paintings, coordinated by terrell James, english by Abdel Hernandez San Juan, The Museum of fine art of Houston, Houston, Texas, usa

Hernández San Juan abdel, 1999- Art Pizte Exhibit: A Perspective from art critique. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, conference lectured in person at the Faculty of sociology and anthropology lectures auditorium on the museographizing of the exhibit of Quetzil Eugenio anthropology, five Maya artists and Quetzil collection of Maya art, a curatorial museography by quetzil Eugenio at Duran Gallery, with the participation in conceptualizing  and spatializing the mise in scene museography by Abdel hernandez San Juan and Lisa Breglia, a travel from Houston to lake forest  discussed as part in a panel Maya art and anthropology (anounced conferences by Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Alaka Wally, Stephen Eisenman, Richard Towsend, Quetzil Eugenio and Lisa Breglia, Lake Forest College Faculty of Sociology and Anthropology, included a workshop, tape recorded and film recorded Lake Forest college, coordinated by Quetzil Eugenio castañeda, 1999 Organizer and Chair. Forum on Maya Art and Anthropology. Panelists: Alaka Alí, (Anthropologist, Field Museum of Natural History),  Abdel Hernández (Artistic Director, Transart Foundation), and Maya Artists: José Kituc, Gilberto Yam Tun, Jorge Pool Cauich, Wilberth Serrano, Juan Gutiérrez. Durand Art Institute, Dec. 2, tape recorded, translated by quetzil Eugenio castañeda, assistance profesor of anthropology, faculty of sociólogy and anthropology, with college and high school students, Lake Forest, Illinois, usa, 1999

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, 1999- Bodies Maps. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, published catalogue, english, translated by Lourdes, Sicardi Gallery, Houston, Texas, USA

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, 2000- Alchemies of the Senses. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, english, translated by Lourdes, Sicardi Gallery, Houston, Texas, USA

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, 2002- The paintings of terrell James. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, translated by surpik Angelini, Houston, Texas

Todorov Tzvetan, Symbolism and Interpretation, Cornell University Press, Feb 18, 1986

Todorov Tzvetan , Genres in Discourse, Cambridge University Press, Published August 31st 1990 by (first published 1978) 

Todorov Tzvetan, Simbolismo e interpretación Todorov, monte avila editores

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Todorov Tzvetan. Teorías del símbolo, monteavila editores

Todorov.Tzvetan Géneros del Discurso, Gedisa

Todorov Tzvetan. Critica de la Crítica, Editorial Paidós

Tyler Stephen A, context of discourse, semantique analysis, A POINT OF ORDER, Pp 133-135, Rice University studies, 1973-1974, USA