Eclipse parcial
Partial eclipse
FRANCISCO JAVIER SAN MARTÍN
“The aorta’s mechanism does more noise still than the elevator, the gear of his
wheels it is fire, awakening: typography of the primary sensations, too simple as if
to be deciphered so fast by the scientific captains.
My dear Picabia: “Living”, having nothing else to say. Dancing by telegraph on
metallic dentures. Or becoming dumb above the line equinoctial to discover in each
instant — perpetua mobilia — that today it is today“.
Tristan Tzara 1
In classical painting, at least since the last late Gothic or the southern quattrocento,
transparency was a synonym of glazing , exclusively a technical resource for depiction;
although we do not quite know how it became a matter of aesthetics or even politics
with the rise of the historical avant-garde. Glass Arkitektur, the idea of which was for
everything to be visible, with no hidden catches, was a formal system of configuration,
and also a reflection – in glass or a mirror – of parliamentary democracy in the field of
architecture and town planning 2 . With Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray, transparency
was successfully transferred to the terrain of plastic arts. Despite this, it was not all
good democratic manners and clarity; transparency also had its ironic and even sarcastic
side. Can we make jokes about something as serious as transparency, that mechanism
that overthrows walls of vision, the oppression of opacity and obscurantism? Apparently
we can. Francis Picabia devoted various paintings to this subject from 1927 to 1929,
containing Spanish women, bullfighters, Virgins, heraldic emblems and Romanesque
apocalyptic frescos. These paintings depicted a poor and poisoned transparency; it was
blurred, it boasted that it left everything visible and yet it made nothing clear. From not
existing, the painting is now not even a stable image – a direct and clear discourse, even
if the background was dark – and starts to look like a collection of unconscious images,
a kind of visual Alzheimer’s , a shapeless mishmash, rubbish. Democratic transparency
– glásnost – became, with Picabia and Duchamp, an imposture. Maybe because both
of them, in the 1920s, were able to imagine that a high dose of transparency could be
crystallised in supervision and visual control.
In a poem that Picabia published in his journal 391 , Demi cons, which means
something like half idiots or halfwits , and what is possibly worse, the artist recited,
or maybe only whispered, “Le monde est pour moi pétri de bon goût et d’ignorance
collés 3 ”. Picabia thought that everything had already been said, but with the word collés
he might have been referring to the opacity that is consubstantial with the collage, in
which a beautiful score by Schubert could be partially covered – silenced – by a horrible
fragment of oilcloth. Faced with this glue, which at the end of the day attempted to
conciliate opposites, Picabia proposed the protocol of confusion, the mishmash or mess of
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
1
Tristan Tzara, Preface for Unique Eunuque by Francis Picabia, Au Sans Pareil (Paris, 1920), p. 13.
Cf. Martí Peran, Glas-Kultur ¿Qué pasó con la transparencia?, exhibition catalogue of the Koldo
Mithelena Kulturunea, San Sebastián and La Panera, Lleida, July 2006 – July 2007. Concerning the
coercive aspect of transparency, cf. Michel Foucault, Vigilar y castigar, Siglo XXI (Madrid, 1978).
2
world for me is good taste and ignorance together”, Francis Picabia, “Demi Cons”, 391 , No. 6, p.
4, reproduced in Francis Picabia, 391, facsimile edition presented by Michel Sanouillet, Pierre Belfond
– Eric Losfeld (Paris, 1976), p. 52.
3 “The