The traces of what is to come

Mario Maure
MA in Latin American Art from Cuyo University,
Mendoza, Argentina.

To say that language finds limitations when describing experience before certain manifestations of the visual arts is a platitude which, nonetheless, we never take all the way. Is it possible to “read” a painting? Text and image, painting and discourse -those forms of representation- are irreducible and intricate at the same time: the painting has the power of showing what the word cannot enunciate.
Using the expression “abstract painting,” for example, to refer to that painting which privileges the gesture is so homogeneous that it leads to error: Is there a painting more “concrete” than this one? Would “non-figurative painting” be more appropriate, when our perception invariably discerns something against a background?
Perhaps a phrase like “non-representative painting” would come closer. And still we are wrong. Because after all, and even before being exposed, it is a communicative act -a very singular one, incidentally- to its own maker. Because it is not pure drive. There is a job done mastering that energy, a series of decisions, which in a way are already a work of representation.
Therefore, in the difficult situation of having to say something about a painting like Alexis Yebra’s, there is nothing else we can do but to crimp memories that -we believe- are a temporal background to his preoccupations in a time in which we lived without skin: the words of a deranged old man, the attempt at some form of transcendence, a relentless cynicism, the nostalgia for what has been lost forever, a jump into the void.

To burn from the inside.

Deux amis

They walk tirelessly along the edges of town
(the interns, the inadvertent)
Agonising tracks on which the last ramshackle trains run
Something is ending and they can feel it
Maybe that is why they wander around the graveyards
Twenty years of anachronisms. (Dis)integration.
There is a cat cut exactly in half by the rail. Speechless at the sight.
Nature/Culture
Long talks with no end (no end?)
Comfortably numb in the winter’s afternoon.

Mendoza, June 2010