machine. The engineers: Harry Houdini and Athanasius Kircher, (Fig. 14) among many
other less famous ones. In the words of Jean Starobinski, the energy that feeds it would
be “religions that have passed away (…), fossil sciences – like astrology, alchemy and
divination – and oneiric sociologies 14 ” .
The name of the piece is very long, so I shall simply call it “the table”. The
table is the idea of incommunicability turned into an image, a mirror that refers us to an
inverted text, a conceptual refuge that is lit from the side, in the shade, in a dark room.
A mystery, and at the same time, a sincere declaration of the possibility that art can live
with communication with its public, or in any case, showing how difficult it is.
The idea of building a Sephiroth as a desk is brilliant, as the Cabbala was
always done on paper, a portable and secret material. Sephiroth is a kind of machine for
understanding the world together with what is not the world. RGG is nostalgic about the
future and endeavours to influence our thought through the window of art. The table is
a machine that leads to incomprehension and is fed by this kind of negative energy to
keep on turning. Looking for the ten-lettered word that starts up the combinatorics of
the Sephiroth, RGG discovered background and from here arose the fertile field of 252
combinations, from “Brogan Duck” to “Ran Bug Dock”. A language that communicates his
problems in making himself understood.
It’s time to come to an end: RGG’s machine-table is saying out loud that it
makes no statements, that in painting there is still room for the incomprehensible. “What
we cannot talk about should remain unsaid” said Wittgenstein in Central Europe in the
Great War, a thought that has made its fortune in modern times, but which in a way
conceals or is superimposed on – eclipses – another one by E. A. Poe, written a century
earlier in the port city of Baltimore: “We cannot talk of complex matters in plain words”.
The combination of these two ideas is perhaps the best definition of art, if there is a
definition, and the most fertile approach we can for the moment make to the work of
Ricardo González García. (Fig. 15, 16 and 17)
“The philosophical myriapoda have broken wooden or metallic legs, and wings
too, somewhere between the train stations of Truth and Reality. There was always
something inapprehensible: LIFE.
An adventure that is fun at times: trying to replace life with a private pleasure.
(Adventures with no remorse that penetrate into art by their own means, to
destroy it slowly, revealing the ash at the core, reciprocal interests, insinuations
and obstacles) (…)”.
Tristan Tzara
15
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Jean Starobinski, “Freud, Breton, Myers”, in L’Oeil vivant II: La relation critique (Paris, 1970), quoted
by Ángel González García in “Evidentemente”, in Pintar sin tener ni idea, op. cit. p. 57.
14
15
Tristan Tzara, Preface for Unique Eunuque by Francis Picabia, Au Sans Pareil (París, 1920), pág. 11.