La Sagezza Stessa

…Speaking about books, the only exact knowledge there is, is the knowledge of the date of publication and the format of the books. That’s an idea Walter Benjamin brought from the poet Anatole France, to bring us an exercise in which many levels of perception, observing and understanding overlap. The act of translation is shown on the objects on display in the exhibition, because it suggests a method, a trial and error that does not pretend to be anything other than a provisional product and not a concrete and fixed result, an amalgamation of situations brought to the surface, and to the preciousness of the object.

Each painting is a first and unique edition, worthy of a true collector of art, books or knowledge. The form and the material are the sole resource of the content, everything that the piece does not contain is what makes it up through evocation and tradition. The exercise of translation is established here under the terms of an unbreakable relationship between the surface and a layer of paint. The colors, design, geometry, abstractions and compositions printed on the book covers are immediately translated onto a new support. Information is suggested as an object. The objects play to lose their content, but they win something else. They become content itself.

To describe one of these objects means to describe them all. But each one is also an entire and specific world. However, in general terms, it is a series of traditional paintings painted under the model suggested by the cover of any book. Either way, they’re all gestures. And these gestures happen when the “gesture” becomes visible, when the medium becomes visible. The gesture is something that properly has nothing to say. It is the cover, the crust of a fiction that must provide a well-calibrated occurrence. The gesture implies certain restrictions and not others, perhaps the translation of a moment.

Through the action of abstracting and bringing everything to the surface with a sleek industrialfinish, I intend to exemplify what the act of translating implies: when a person affirms something, he or she contains the omission of the rest of everything that he or she did

not affirm. The paintings hanging on the wall emphasize their status as consumer objects, which are also books, but they are not books, they are ultimately paintings. They play at being books, they are objects of fetichism. Sometimes with text but almost always without some type of verbal reference that links them to their original content or idea of “book”. By bringing everything to the surface, I intend to remove the content and stay with the form, that helps me to evoke what was contained before distorting something that was already distorted. Objects that are torn between debt and promise, a debt owed to books, the original starting point of this exhibition. Books as objects, objects like books that look like books, but in the end are paintings. I intend not to establish any type of hierarchy, but to propose a debate in three directions; They are all made of the same material, they all take up space, and they all give up their content even if they evoke it, starting a conversation with the viewer.

Through all these abstractions I am not looking to affirm at first glance, that many times the act of translating something can “reduce the area of thought.” And of course, no translation is adequate and no translation is faithful, but I intend to express that in any type of translation there are absolute losses. In fact, the form of a book is independent of the content of its pages and the original idea of its making. Having a book, buying it, and in this case, hanging it, does not exactly mean reading it. There is an unbridgeable distance between the different kinds of language in this exhibition, which is finally resolved on the gesture of precious abstraction and the emphasis of the object quality, on the gesture that deliberately omits what is written and in this case what is excessive.

The painting objects based on books can be read as an open specificity, as a potentiality, as an instance that opens and allows as many readings as possible. The original and the translated version speak in one direction. Surface and paint. Both become constituents and cooperators in a new way. The originals are modified in the translation exercise and it is fiction that provides them with a place: an art gallery. The enrichment is mutual: translation is a form of integration, perhaps the necessary step required for the rest of what happens there to enter into conversation. These objects embrace their own fiction, and lay in contradiction.

Walter Benjamin said that for a genuine book collector, appropriating one implies the most intimate relationship possible with an object It is the true collector who, instead of making the books come to life in him, is the one who lives in them, through them. Through this work, I intend to transform the nature of a collection of objects, and reconfigure it with a gesture the perception of what can be read and what the eyes cannot see. They give up some things in order to reveal others.