June 2008
We are still used to domesticating the image of the world. From the renaissance period, the surrounding space that we call "reality" enters the canvas, paper or screen, claiming to be the mirror of what is in front of our eyes. The development of perspective as a certain strategy of representation presumed a shift from psycho-physiological to mathematical space. This is constructed as an artificial invention able to deceive our perception, as it spins a new reality and tries to conceal its seams at the same time. Although artists have denied or questioned mimesis since the times of historical avant-garde, the concept of picture-window in classical painting, photography, television or digital picture still remains part of our culture. And even though we have already seen through this trick and hear the squeaking of its hinges, the window is still here and we do not want to abandon the illusion.
"Space Translations"combines these historical and epistemological codes. Codes which establish the relationship between subject and reality, and the related aesthetics which penetrate our artistic and media fields. The landscape we see through this window is re-created through the alphabetical and numerical signs of the ASCII code; it exposes the process of representation as a construct. It is no longer the representation of reality, but its calculus - which reminds us of Borges' text about the map which has the same dimensions as the empire.
In "Space Translations", the drawing masks the referent by stitching an identical face onto it, while at the same time showing the rubber bands that hold the mask. The magic of the picture is put into motion, while at the same time it reveals itself as a trick. The phantasm of the real is still present - the drawing continues to reveal a landscape that we see through the windows, and in the pattern of the parquetry on the floor - but the result is no longer a drawing as a product, but as a process.
In this operation, each of the sheets of A4 paper in the installation works as a piece of a puzzle which does not picture reality, but the will to a credible language. The referential picture remains as a residual spectre which has snuck through the indecipherability of the signs composing each pattern. The ASCII code is not for reading; it creates a drawing, no longer as a mirror, but as a spectral diagram, and thus it manifest the way in which each representation becomes in the end a translation.
Valentina Montero
© 2007, etc. galerie
Kateřinská 20, Praha 2, Czech Republic / info@etcgalerie.cz
