Drawing on Simultaneity
Today, most of us are quite comfortable with Google maps, and the ease with which we are able to shrink our search from a continental scope all the way down to a street view in a matter of seconds. The enhanced clarity that comes with each click of the mouse leads us to greater detail and ultimately to something we can easily relate to. In a similar way, one can easily become sucked into a drawing by Eduardo Santiere, graduating from an appreciation of the work as a cosmos on paper to getting lost in the most minute mark. The difference is that the map search takes us on a linear journey from macro to micro, whereas Santiere offers up every layer simultaneously, an entire world where neurons and Neptune are treated as equals.
Biologically, our brains are not wired for a non-hierarchical understanding of our world, either real or imagined, and we can’t help but impose some organization, even subconsciously. The smallest detail in any given quadrant of one of Santiere’s works—each blot, elliptical form, scratch or puncture— is arguably as significant as any other, or even as important as the piece in entirety. So while we may be programmed to organize these disparate parts into a global whole, something about his unique treatment of the forms forces us to look and perceive each part in a multi-textural way.
Santiere claims that he finds truth and beauty through the process of drawing. Without going from pre-conceived images, but rather allowing imperceptible traces and a kind of automatic marking process to guide him, he comes to a composition that vibrates with life. Once he turns these works out into the world, each of us digests that energy in a different way. The elements of his drawing have been likened to cells, computer circuitry, musical notation, outer space, utopian urban plans and dreamscapes, to name only a few. One thing each of these interpretations has in common, however, is growth or movement.
Santiere’s largest work to date, titled Inter-Space is unique in that he sticks to graphite solely, removing the color that is an integral part of much of his work. As the name implies, we see a complex web of stipple dots and clusters that conjure galactic bodies and constellations, seen in reverse negative. The individual dots seem to be magnetically drawn together at certain spots, perhaps slave to a pattern or rhythm of some unknown origin. It is somehow both violent and balletic, with markings that look to be the result of forceful contact with the paper, yet when viewed as a group seem to float and dance across the page.
In another series in the exhibition, titled Symphonies, we have a fairly encyclopedic sampling of Santiere’s gestural vocabulary. In particular, his “scratching”, as he calls it, is the result of his careful manipulation of the paper’s surface. This treatment creates a kind of relief that is similar to the burr created in the dry-point etching technique. The use of graphite and colored pencils adds yet another layer. In music, the termsimultaneity is used to describe musical texture that occurs at the same time instead of in succession. In this musically-inspired series, it seems Santiere has visualized this construct.
Santiere’s incredible ability to render life and energy, both as whole forms and as individual stimuli, offers us a rare opportunity to experience art in a rich, textured way. Whether we are imagining our universe or an imaginary microscopic universe that exists on a speck of dust within our planet, experiencing simultaneity in art.
Ginger Gregg Duggan and Judith Hoos Fox, curatorsquared
The Melancholy Geometry of Mercedes Elena González
The subtext
Could an image serve as the beacon of its historical context? Could that image capture the distinctive points of inflection of its social environment, making them visible? These questions might be answered in the affirmative; yet in some cases, one might interject, only with the benefit of hindsight. It seems unlikely, for instance, that the first readers of the inaugural issue of Integral, an architecture and art magazine published in Caracas during the mid-1950s, could have detected in its cover image the ability to foreground the cultural gist of their time. Designed by Carlos González Bogen and dated September 1955, the cover is a cluster of shapes distributed along horizontal registers—some uprightly angular, others flexed into diving curves, and all of them informed by the rhythm of percussive shifts between white and a pale brown. Their abstract condition, which is to say their discursive blankness, would arguably have prevented such shapes from prompting associations of a cultural or any other kind.
Yet, one might also argue, it is because of abstraction’s lack of discursive pointers that the cover’s image could have been read as the beacon of its historical background, marked by the much intensified pace of modernization campaigns begun in the mid-1940s. The latter argument might be reasoned as follows: “modernity” was an undefined concept, a word whose meaning(s) remained undetermined to those who heard it being heralded in the 1950s. In academic jargon, modernity was an “empty signifier”—a cluster of sounds mired in indeterminacy as it could be defined differently from sites that diverged socially, culturally and politically. And so the term was stubbornly abstract. It would be, therefore, best conveyed by forms that, like those of abstraction, were obstinately empty in their rejection of discourse. This entails that a structural fit of sorts linked the term modernity and abstract art: both offered a blank space for the projection of social meaning, a horizon of expectations that loomed as undetermined as the equally open-ended promise of collective “progress.”
The text
Integral’s cover provides the support for the series of drawings which Mercedes Elena González has produced since 2011 and titled “September 1955” according to the issue’s month and year of publication. The title already points at the guiding thread of the series: rather than a blank page, the support is an exact moment in time, its historical weight and the questions it raises. And rather than abstract, discursively blank forms attached to the empty signifier “modernity,” it is an oversignified legacy that serves as the series’ point of departure. For González belongs to a generation of artists who had to confront not only the heroic modernism of their country’s first wave of abstract art, but also that art’s failure to make true on the promise it raised when it declared itself “modern”: at once the beacon of social change and the emblem of visual renewal, the enlightening harbinger of a new collective vision.
Thus, as she spins the series’ guiding thread through her revisiting of the cover’s image, González weaves history into a thickly knitted surface—a surface permeated by a melancholy gaze, as the artist has stated. Instead of being directed at a promissory moment, such a gaze glances back at the fallen language of abstraction to articulate, in the wake of its historical ruin, a geometry of loss. This it does by layering upon the modernist image a texture of inscriptions that read as organic growth, itself legible as the return to that primeval landscape which geometry would have reshaped into a rational and, therefore, progressive and modern terrain. Therefore the artist’s inscriptions are not just textural; they also are a text, the written trace of mourning. Remarkably intimate, that text undoes the identification between reason and social advancement, or between abstraction’s geometric logic and collective transformation. It retreats into a subjective realm in which the artist’s historical distance from her legacy gives way to the mournful contemplation of an unfulfilled promise. The drawn text appears, therefore, allegorical. It appears opaque, constructed from the now disconnected fragments which the cover work had linked through dynamic rhythm, the putative image of progress. And yet, were one to follow Walter Benjamin’s reflections on melancholy, out of such fragments there still might sparkle the flash of a renewed historical recognition, the possibility of critical redemption.
Juan Ledezma