Dos visiones de la violencia y lo borroso
/ Two visions of violence and what is blurred:
Fig. 3a.
Robert Frederick, Ataque japonés al USS
Enterprise, 24 de agosto de 1942 / The
Japanese attack on the USS Enterprise, 24
August 1942.
Fig. 3b.
David Seymur / Magnum Photos, Teresa, una
niña criada en un campo de concentración,
dibujó de esta forma “su casa” en una pizarra,
Polonia, 1948 /Teresa, a girl who was brought
up in a concentration camp, drew her “house”
like this on a blackboard. Poland, 1948.
one side and the other of the image. I would not look so much at the explosive violence of
the picture that put an end to the life of the person who was daring or foolhardy enough
to take it, but rather at its blurred and fluid nature: on the idea that extreme violence –
death – is difficult to focus 6 . (Fig. 3a and 3b)
RGG proposed a post-political and also post-documentary programme: to
acquire images of reality, so that nothing remains of that reality except a rare and clouded
lees that takes us nowhere – that neither directs nor misdirects us – getting reality to
be finally and radically incomprehensible, and that from this impossibility a new hidden
sense arises. Art, in this context, becomes a dark and yet solid paradigm, a thick liquidity
or a fluid solidity. RGG conceives of painting and the actual act of painting as somewhere
to claim the opacity of so much transparency, and from a historical point of view, to
convert the pictorial into a radically anti-illustrated happening: the end of transparent
painting, the end of illuminating art, the end of the pedagogy of art. The beginning of art.
RGG takes his stance, with his painting, with art, in the antipodes of the
aesthetics of documentation, in the fallacy of the archive as an illustrated aesthetic
device, because rather than magnifying information, he aims to disorder it to discover
the impossible sense of images, the legality of violence, the jurisprudence of torture, the
logic of death. In this way, the installation of little pictures, watercolours and any other
accumulation of the artist’s images has nothing at all to do with that archive logic that
puts everything away and explains next to nothing, with that obsession for accumulation
that ends up spread out in the desert.
All of this is related to the old – and aged – problem of form and content,
with the dialectics between the visual or sensitive aspects of an image and that other
that we are not allowed to see but that we perceive as present; a message, something
that the image tells us beyond its mere formal configuration. As André Derain wrote,
the spherical shape of a ball is what matters least. The ball has numerous qualities,
possibly more essential ones, than the spherical shape: the fact that it rolls down a
slope, its mobility, the fact that it bounces off a hard surface, its elasticity. So it would
seem that the spherical form of a ball says less about it than its content of rolling or
bouncing. Moreover, does the spherical form of a ball tell us anything about its weight,
its consistence, its touch, its smell? A hollow ball and a solid ball have exactly the same
shape, but our experience of them is radically different 7 . And you don’t have to read the
Gestalt concepts of psychology to appreciate these aspects. Life constantly shows us that
what is concealed is usually more decisive than what is visible, that the weight can be
more dangerous than the shape, and in short, that the forms of politics are usually less
decisive for people than its consequences.
On the back and the front
Painting is a coloured plane in which the other side, the one against the wall, is a kind
of uselessness, or in the worst case, a waste. Illuminated manuscripts, whether bound
in book format or not, have their recto and verso ; coins have heads and tails. In both
cases, the sheet of parchment and the vulgar coin, we are talking about objects that live
in the world, in all three dimensions, in life itself we could say. A picture hanging on a
wall, despite the fact that it too belongs to life, despite the fact that it shows figures and
scenes or just shapes and colours, also contains something of an abstract object, like an
absent quality. Only one of its sides is valid, while the other, although it is necessary, is
useless. Frescos, and in general, all murals, are an exception: they only have one side,
a wall does not have heads and tails. Triptychs, especially in the North, in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, were another exception: when open they are an image divided
up into three parts but when you close the panels, there is another one, often in grisaille.
They are an exception thanks to their Calvinist economy of the surface, the hyper-use of
the surface and the accumulation of images on both sides of the pictorial plane. But there
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6 Cf. Francisco Javier San Martín, “Turbulencias en la cámara”, in the catalogue Pintura de cámara,
Koldo Mitxelena Kulturunea (San Sebastián, 2002), pp. 33-35.
Cf. Ángel González García, “La edad de yeso, o el clasicismo por los rincones”, in Pintar sin tener ni
idea , Lampreave y Millán (Madrid, 2007), pp. 281-282.
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