Text published in Centro de Bajo Rendimiento I

1. Diary of drawings.

Some years ago I decided to start a diary made up of drawings, trying to rescue one image a day out of the flow of events.. I wanted to be able to incorporate into the body of my work aspects of experience that I normally disregard as material for artwork – not because they come out of everday experience, but because they tend to deal with incoherent, contradictory, dirty matter; unfulfilled desires, fleas rather than whales.

Images appeared of rivers, clouds, organs, open wounds, falling, erotic forms, spinal column, empty forms, hands, hands with amputated fingers, dogs, split forms, fire. Torn or torn off pieces of paper. Texts from stories I was told or read in the press whose violence made and makes it impossible to find an image for. (An inseparable part of this project is the life experience of the same year which involved successive losses and depression.)

Most of these images have passed out of my work and not recurred like others. What is still present, though, is what I was able to study during the making of this project of the lives and nature of images themselves.

The drawings accumulated on the studio wall. Among this group of fragments, groups of analogous images formed, and material was transported from one to another, going through partial metamorphoses. I moved the drawings around from one point on the wall to another, and began to see this cumulus of images as a sky-space crossed by winds, in which cloud forms emerged and dissolved in the groupings of images.

Comments on the project:

G., curator who visited the studio: “What the hell is this all about?”.

B., artist I did a workshop with: “You'll have to find a technique for this project”.

Other members of the workshop: no comment.

This project always failed in its encounter with the world. I came to the conclusion that the analogies I could see among the images were not apparent to other people, perhaps because the process of observation of this project took place over time – so that the only perceivable structure must have been a horrible mass of fragments. I decided not to show the work any more. 6 years later I still have doubts as to its relevance to others. I think the basic problem is one of structures; of the search for structures that will organize experience. Perhaps the drawing diary would be better accepted now with the prevalence of formats such as blogs; but I still ask what kind of appetites these formats satisfy and what desires they do not answer.

2. Series of drawings of clouds.

One frustration I have with drawing is that I am never satisfied with it unless I have an external visual model. When I don't, my drawings always seem poor to me in terms of what I want them to be: form emerging. This leads to a constant dialogue with the world which weaves my encounter with it.

Form emerging is something in continual tension, which is made and remade over time. The drawings are a remains of a process of encountering, memorizing and representing, a back and forth movement from world to paper through the body and mind, that is constituted as form, as possibility, as something separate and distinct. This process includes doubt and a space where the mind wanders. I want the tension in it to be visible.