Gabriel Rico
Gabriel Rico, a Mexican artist, his work is characterized by the interrelation of seemingly disparate objects. He pairs found, collected, and manufactured materials to create sculptures that invite viewers to reflect on the relationship between humans and our natural environment.
He frequently uses neon, taxidermy, ceramics, branches, and more personal pieces of his past to create some formulation, achieving a precise geometry despite the organic, roughly hewn character of his materials. Influenced by scientific approaches, geometry and philosophy, the artist creates non-mathematical equations from objects that reflect our fundamental struggle to achieve balance.
Gabriel Rico,'Doce ', 2018
Gabriel Rico,'I Mural from the series-Reducción objetiva orquestada ', 2018
Plato' s 'Allegory of the Cave'
In Gabriel Rico' s art, he can be acting like a magician, being good at utilizing a massive variety of objects or elements to build a certain kind of subjective system, incorporating numbers, mathematics, daily tools, etc. But none of the equation or formulation is meant to make any sense. I can see there might be something similar to a brainstorm, making things up and linking the images or symbols with each other, which requires the artist ability of fertile imagination across the time, history, nature and culture.
For instance, the work 'I Mural - Reducción objetiva orquestada' (2019) -meaning 'Mural - Orchestrated objective reduction' in English, each mounted objects, sign or drawing can be regarded as a contemporary society's totem. I could not help to assume that He is obsessed with the Allegory of the Cave and the conception of the Plato 's Cave, and he also named his latest solo exhibition ' The Discipline of the Cave'. I think he is trying to fuse the possibility of transcendence into contemporary society's daily life and to convey that even the very least kitsch can be a part of 'shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind the caver'. Everyone can be the caver, giving the meaning of every daily object in our sight, turn them into the 'shadow' on the blank wall from an individual perspective.
The description of 'Intuitionism' in Gabriel Rico's Talk
Gabriel Rico,'Treinta y nueve from the series-Reducción objetiva orquestada ', 2019
In a lecture delivered to School of Visual Arts by Rico, he talked about the influence of the philosophical concept of 'Intuitionism' on his art. Maybe in his opinion, math could be a human heritage, is considered to be purely the result of the constructive mental activity of humans rather than the discovery of fundamental principles claimed to exist in an objective reality, so as his art. In this talk, he suggests that all the mathematics facts, as some fragments from chaos, are coming from some sort of transcendental thinkings. So all his job is to search for those reasonable and interesting ones from a chaotic system for his unique aesthetic building. Maybe that sounds a bit insane or void because it cannot be proved by any theory or it is still unacceptable by most people. But if take his theory and art to the world of metaphysics, I think he is very successful. I think he keeps trying to create a site that allows people to imagine, out of intuition, starting from a blank mind, as he said in this presentation.
Interestingly, Like another Latin-born famous artists and writers (Cecilia Vicuña, Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges), they similarly tend to focus on something more abstract beyond the substance reality, turn all the tangible substances into different fragments of symbolism by using their imagination to form and then visualise the picture in their mind. It seems there is a symbolism world in their imagination, each piece of the whole can be seen individually separate and meanwhile linked with each other, like a giant puzzle, an obscure riddle. This is magical, transcendental, primal, instinctive.
Cerith Wyn Evans
Cerith Wyn Evans's artistic practice focuses on how ideas can be communicated through form. His conceptual work incorporates a diverse range of media including installation, sculpture, photography, film and text.
His poetic work has a highly refined aesthetic, deeply informed by film, music, literature and philosophy. Visual or textual sources and ideas are often repeated across different bodies of work, an indication of his desire to keep ideas in play or to bring them back to life as raw material for future use.
Cerith Wyn Evans,'Still Life (In course of arrangement)... VI', 2020
'Still Life (In course of arrangement)... VII', 2020
Cerith Wyn Evans,' F=O=U=N=T=A=I=N', 2020
These are some pictures I shot in the artist's solo exhibition ‘No realm of thought... No field of vision’ at White Cube Bermondsey. What impressed me the most is a certain kind of site-specific atmosphere, created by all those seemingly unrelated and meaningless objects, including slightly rotating plants, gestural painting, translated texts, and dazzling neon lights.
With the sounds or noise made by some transparent glass pipes and the over-exposure of lights, the whole of the work maybe refers to something like long-lasting white noise on a snow screen, a long time blankness. I think the negative space or shape of the work is as important as the work itself. This reminds me of the 'Liu Bai' in Chinese painting, a skill of composition or line drawing by leaving blankness or emphasizing the negative shape to allow more imagination in simplicities. The artist seems to intentionally emphasize the blankness in his work by using sound and light filling the gallery space. So There is something beyond or above those purely simple substance objects can be somehow perceived by the viewers when they immerse themselves in the space. That might be the same as the 'imagination space' in Chinese ink painting, like a kind of poetic-aesthetic sense, only can be perceived but cannot be described in words.
Snow Screen (often comes with white noise)
'Liu Bai' in Chinese ink painting
Cecilia Vicuña
Cecilia Vicuña’s major work presents a delicate balancing act between the large- and small-scale, and between works that are explicitly political and those that are more personal. Combining textiles, video, found objects, wood, paper, poetry, and more, Vicuña’s art is grounded in the artist’s dedication to her craft and to her advocacy, often making the most impact with the most intimate, fragile works.
Poet, artist, and filmmaker based in New York and Santiago, her work is noted for themes of language, memory, dissolution, extinction and exile.
Cecilia Vicuña was distinguished with Premio Velázquez de Artes Plásticas 2019, Spain’s most prominent art award and given out by the Spanish Ministry of Culture to an artist based in the country or from the Ibero-American Community of Nations. The jury statement said that she is receiving the award for her “outstanding work as a poet, visual artist and activist” and her “multidimensional art that interacts with the earth, written language, and weaving.”
CECILIA VICUÑA 'About to Happen', 2017
Her medium is the place where art and poetry find a way to expand into the limitless. In her artistic practice, she draws inspiration from life and death, mostly from the notion that death is always near us and its freeing force that gives life its pulse. So most of her work tends to disappear or speaks about disappearance, as a source of joy, renewal and transformation. Like a sacred ritual aims to sooth those unfulfilled desires of the people living in 21th-century bubble reality.
Philosophy and poetry in terms of time
Jorge Luis Borges in contemplating 'Time'
“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”
(Jorge Luis Borges (August 24, 1899–June 14, 1986)“A New Refutation of Time,”)
Reflective note: In 'Time is the substance I am made of', interpreted from my perspective, it might somehow suggest the relationship between the human and time - Time can be me, I can be time itself. Maybe Jorge Luis Borges is also trying to demonstrate both contradictory sides of time when it makes an impact on the human body and mind. However, I think it is a bit difficult to agree or understand this statement without employing fertile imagination and decisively believing in intuition.
Making his way through the maze of philosophy, Borges maps what he calls “this unstable world of the mind” in relation to time: "A world of evanescent impressions; a world without matter or spirit, neither objective nor subjective, a world without the ideal architecture of space; a world made of time, of the absolute uniform time of [Newton’s] Principia; a tireless labyrinth, a chaos, a dream."
Gaston Bachelard
“If our heart were large enough to love life in all its detail, we would see that every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer,”
"Whether it comes from suffering, or whether it comes from joy, we all experience as human beings this moment of illumination at some point in our lives: a moment when we suddenly understand our own message, a moment when knowledge, by shedding light on passion, detects at once the rules and relentlessness of destiny — a truly synthetic moment when decisive failure, by rendering us conscious of the irrational, becomes the success of thought. That is the locus of the differential of knowledge, the Newtonian burst that allows us to appreciate how insight springs forth from ignorance — the sudden inflection of human genius upon the curvature of life’s progress. Intellectual courage consists in actively and vitally preserving this instant of nascent knowledge, of making it the unceasing fountain of our intuition, and of designing, with the subjective history of our errors and faults, the model of a better, more illuminated life."
(Gaston Bachelard (June 27, 1884–October 19, 1962) "Intuition of the Instant")
Hannah Arendt
“It is the insertion of man with his limited life span that transforms the continuously flowing stream of sheer change … into time as we know it,”
(Hannah Arendt(October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975)
Einstein
"Einstein insisted that only two types of time existed: physical, the kind measured by clocks, and psychological, the subjective kind Virginia Woolf would later observe. For Bergson, this was a barbaric and reductionist perspective robbing time of the philosophical dimension that permeates nearly every aspect of how we experience its flow."
"Time, he argued, was not something out there, separate from those who perceived it. It did not exist independently from us. It involved us at every level."
Eternity and a Day (1998) - Theodoros Angelopoulos
On a psychological level, Eternity and Day is a film about dreaming and remembering: its memories are woven from the fabric of Alexander’s life, while its dreams reach to the imagination of the Albanian boy. In the beginning of the film, the little boy has no past to recall — at least he has hardly any expression on his face. As his relationship with Alexander deepens, however, both of them regain the ability to mourn, and the Albanian grieves the death of his friend Selim. Moreover, when the unlikely friends separate from each other at the end of the film, a ship sails away from the port — carrying onboard the boy who’s been taught by Alexander to dream of seeing seaports on his journey.
what is time?
Grandpa said, it's a kid
playing sand at the beach
Following Theodor W. Adorno, it is memory that is needed for us — both as human beings and as a nation — to come to ourselves, and without memory, indeed, we fall to melancholia and never begin the proper grieving work. This idea seems to fit the texture of Eternity and a Day as well, for it is the memories that bring both the protagonist and his juvenile friend to life. With the film’s tint of melancholic existentialism, however, is mixed a Mediterranean element of joy and friendship (as Risto Heiskala noted in good spirit), without which Alexander’s and the Albanian boy’s intimate relationship would perhaps never come into being.
Theo Angelopoulos 1998 Eternity and a Day
00:04:28/02:07:36
Theo Angelopoulos 1998 Eternity and a Day
02:01:24/02:07:36
