The empty-loaded image

              In the past, artists devoted themselves to representing
events. The content of the representatíon was usually descrip-tive
or allegorícal, and at the base was carved a date in
román numeráis that ñxed in time whatever was being com-memorated.
Few people today can make out the contents of
allegorícal representations, as well as the texts inscríbed on
pedestals. Commemoration becomes an undecípherable ruin.
Furthermorc, our agonised age doesn't provide us with many
events worth recording.
Thus, Castillo's work is not only a poetic proposal on the
división of subjective time, but a criticism too of the intended
objectivity of objective events.
Instead of allegory. Castillo uses the murky and uniform
surface of a steel mirror, on which he records a date. The
vague image of the person who looks into the steel mirror
contrasts with the precisión of the recorded date. The solé
objective factor is the date; the reflected human image is
ghostly and evanescent, called to disappear, while the date
lasts. In order to read the date you have to see yourself.
Readíng a date is a straight and tautological act, I read a
date which is only a date; yet my image doesn't correspond.
The reality of the chronology laid down by the artist con­trasts
with the unreaUty of the beholder. It is the artist's
revenge on the public, and against criticism. What happens
if the artist himself looks into his mirror? Then there's a
schism between creative subject and his awareness of time.
This invoked duration is fetishistic. We find date fetishism,
or the date as fetish of a present that anxiously seeks perma-nence.
The crisis of the subject, blurred in the mirror, is
unmasked by the fetishistic objectuaUty of a date referring to
a bygone ego. The I only takes shape as commemoration.
Time is made up of remembered events in the form of chro-nological
inscriptions.
The relationship between the objective date and the distor-ted
image of the subject in the mirror is dialectic, for the
mirror wouldn't distort if the date hadn't been recorded on
it. The engraving of the numbers deforms the surface and
also deforms the reflected image. Therefore the chronological
reduction of time gives way to the ambiguous character of
the image in the mirror.
The chronological visión of time Antonio del Castillo pro­poses
is fragmentary and atomized. To note down dates in a
calendar has nothing to do with history, if we understand by
history the reasoned articulation of a seríes of events. Here,
dates represen! isolated happenings, and as we ignore what
they are and what they mean, it is impossible to compose
with them any plausible explanation or interpretation. We
meet, at this point, the second meaning contained in Del Cas­tillo's
crítique; against interpretation, in other words, against
history. There aren't any historícal laws, no significance, and
if it exists, we don't know about it. The chronology that
Antonio del Castillo sets out in his exhibition is fortuitous:
time is the sum. of exceptional moments. He has an atomized
notion of it. He isn't interested in progression; this work is
based on the onthology of Parmenides, where being is all.
Unlike Heraclitus. We can't stumble over the same stone
twice. He is obsessed with duration, with permanence. In the
flnal analysis, what is art but the objectifíed dream of the
indestructible essence of the experíenced moment?
Jorge Ortega:
At fu^t sight, the whole appearance of the young cañarían
artist's exhibition held at the Manuel Ojeda Gallery, Anotar
(Notation), is disarmingly conventional in form. The end of
year art school project, top-heavy with academicism. Howe-ver,
the fínal impact of his work, sober and under control,
is that of the image which approaches the void, simulta-neously
appearíng as the neutral valué of symbol that pain-ting
has always been. The interview that foUows enabled us
to explore the fertile fíeld of implication, absence and pre-sence.
Anotar is a work-project, issuing from a process of
thought and j^osophical defínition particularly signifícant for
the artist at this moment, who is devoted to the completion
of his academic thesis in Cuenca, Spain. It is encouraging to
see an artist faithfully notating philosophical tracts, who then
searches in the spirit of his art (painting), for a resonance that
not only imitates what has been understood, but puts the ins-piration
deríved into practice, adding imagination to thought,
testing it, exposing it to different expression. The catalogue
is well packed with quotes (Barthes, Foucault, Hockney, Revi­lla),
and it creates an initial implication that precedes the
work. He insists very clearly that this preliminary literature
isn't "Information about the exhibition", but a group of ideas
obtained form reading. An immediate projection that is made
onto the work from the annotated thought is structuralism's
palimpsest text. The prívileged domain of the signifíaat, cul­tural
battle fíeld where significance, oíd defínite sense, beco­mes
an arm-wrestle between historícal epochs, in a great pro­gression
of interpretation, that superimposes and rejects. The
text contains, retains through the word a seríes of cultural
meanings, in a way that is very similar to the workings of
image. It is wrong, nevertheless, to imagine Ortega as an art-history
researcher, inspite of the Morandi-like aspect of his
images. His is an aristocratic search for "elective aflinities"
of mind, between puré thought, applied thought and the
reality of aesthetics.
There's something vague and bliury, like a dirty lens, in his
natura mortes, plants, bottles, lamps and books. The claríty
he pursues is the agent of distance in a clean economy.
Among his notes, there's a sad reflection on aphasia, the ina-bility
to formalize unitary visión. Emst Gombrich, stimulated
by his great teacher Julius Schlosser, theorized on perception;
the application of inherent mind order to extemal díaos, coer-cing
anarchy into visual pattem. This timeless chemistry gives
US the pleasure of sensation: sight. Something aphasic lies in
the final vagueness of Jorge's images, something that doesn't
quite complete the decoding process of perception. Inside the
windowless house, where precise visión shouTd rule, we find
instability.
A n A A
Tlie empty-loaded image
JONATHAN ALLEN
There is a quote from Revilla's Iconographic Dictionary
that relates water to the Dionysian cult, and so takes on the
power of an external regenerative agent. Ortega thinks about
one of our traditional dycotomies, which has always projected
the image of antagonism: it first struck the Greek world,
sobriety versus intoxication, the centrifugal versus the centri-petal.
What has been identified, from the hegemonic Euro-pean
bastión as "forces of dissolution". I paraphrase a
renown thirties Mallarmé critic: beneath the traslucent polis-hed
surface of his verse and his purified symbols seethes the
dissolution that Hinduism brings to the world, supreme fluc-tuation.
At this juncture, the artist's work seems hypercultu-ral,
a metatext of implications. The antagonism represented
tends to the frigid, imbued with sobriety, perhaps as a result
of that efficient neutrality.
The painter doesn't look for authentic representation in this
dimensión, but a sense of contemporary resonances. The incur­sión
of Dionysian culture into the extant and weak forms of
tradition offers a certain parallel with the situation of actual
world politics, the challenge of multiracialism as prominent
escape. The stability/instability that hovers above the neutral
images of Ortega is a pass he makes at this new dialectic. Tra­ditional,
colonialist, deterministic crossbreeding, that has defi-ned
the history of so many societies (like the cañarían), is no
use any more long term; real multiracialism would mean a
quick, radical disappearance of frontiers, integration, and not
pathetic friendship gestures between different cultures.
While the painter is proving to us his active assimilation of
other cultural realities, his painting projects a contradictory
unity of image. Centered and central, the domestic objects
pose like effigies, with mystical stamina, as the artist says, con-juring
and distancing passion, or imposing order over it, a
containing action. What we are getting is the deep-seated neu­tral
stability of image, the eye emptied of its religious reality
that nonetheless continúes exerting its power against any reaso-nable
doubt as to its validty.
Light emerges as another allegorical forcé, leading to the
present. His images are soaked in light, they breathe light. It
simultaneously becomes static photorealism. Distance, melan-choly
filter through this luminous chink. The painter argües
he's wanted to avoid the vast shadow of european art, that
dark and magnificent alter ego where thought is generated,
that black backdrop of spanish art that John Berger writes
about.
Jorge Ortega. 1993.
Nothing, says the painter, "is hidden from sight". Here we
have transparency, a vague condition that New Age political
thinking aspires to.
Light silhouettes the tender outlines of the plants that live
indoors with the artist. We tálk, in the interview, of another
natural space that no longer exists, of nature that has become
national park video material, or an energy that the Romantics
set in motion again. Another quote from Revilla's Iconogra­phic
Dictionary on the Enlightened's botanical garden esta-blishes
distance in relation to domestic plants; the efforts
made towards imperializing nature, that we drag along from
Enlightenment days. Is image the tranquillity of a back-ground,
yet another silence, or a symbol that activates pola-rities?
That seems to me a good question.
yV^ r