Gesture/text

 

Gesture/text: An Hermeneutical approach to Vincench

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

     A certain part of Jose angel Vincench visual art can be readen from the perspective of gesture and inscription relationships, on the one hand, gesture and writing, on the other, rituality and analysis, abstraction and text; concepts that seems to be antinomies while exposed in his work to a permanent dialogue and exploration; it is about relations of mutual necessity and paradoxically of mutual exclusion between pairs

  A gesture is ephemeral, spontaneous, evanescent, its fixation remains contradictory to its own nature.

   I am thinking here about pieces developed as inscripturalized fixations of spontaneous gestures when the image of “dripping” looks to be constrained by the cold image of spontaneous gestures gazed as inscription in his “Paintings of action”, a serie made sometimes in silver, occasionally in gold or even in black, when the dramaturgical effect in semantical terms, relations of sense, mainly focus on the contrast between a gesture and its inscription. Any gesture, in fact, a soon as we see to it as a denotation sign, a clues or an indicial sign end to be a gesture itself to become an inscription or a memory of it.

  I am also thinking in his serie “From the interior of the earth” which also mostly goes around gestures but in another form related with stein, in this case we always have the entrance on canvas of hand writing when the moment gesture/writing seem and appear as semantically pivotal in the production of sense. Certainly, all the unusual distributed objects communicating the interior of the earth with the outside external weather surface are classified with dates and hours in this paintings as well as we can perceive scriptural vestiges or reminiscences behind layers of gestures in the background. 

   In some of the paintings we can directly read sentences intersected at several levels as readable contents but there is one major between the serie, a piece in which now there is no writing as much but more directly an almost emblematic sign or icon of a text, like saying, “this is a text”, the printing image in two diagramed columns of a text of paragraphs 

  This piece is an emblematic icon of palimpsests

  I don’t remember a better solutioned visual balance of such an autonomic pair as gesture/text as in this painting, nor a better harmonized visual approach to palimpsests juxtaposition of spatial and temporal distinct codes in a new whole as in this piece; it is about a memory that includes behind the symbolic image of a grave

   I understand here the concept of antinomies in a Kantian sense, Kantian antinomies focused on paradoxes, for example,  what is first a simple element or a composed whole?, if we think about simple elements we will ever imagine an addition of an added contiguous list of plus to plus linear elements then we imagine that simple elements are originated firsts, but through such a contiguous addition there is no relation between elements, only a sequence of plus, to be related in between, a composed whole is needed, then we realize the opposite that composition is first than elements, two contradictory affirmations on a same issue appear as autonomic

  Vincench art seems to be a way of working with such antonymic poles by exploring the complexities of it both relations and separations, mutual necessity and mutual exclusions in between, probably the reason to understand why his art moves within an image of rituality, gesture and spontaneity on the one side and an image of ascetic circumspection, minimalism, design and conceptuals under a controlled economy of elements 

     I am regarding in this sense nor only his more obvious works related with ritual from 95 to 2002 when the issue of ritual was the theme of various pieces some times in a religious sense, but also about his current neogeometrical abstractions made in gold as well as a current work focused in a more delimited idea of concept were we can even speak about the visual image of concept sometimes through pieces composed only by texts and writings without visual icons and sometimes composed by the visual concept of text 

   Similarly to the use of text at “From the interior of the earth” there is a current piece in which again we have the visual image that can be considered an emblematic icon of a text, the two columns distributed and diagramed paragraphs in printed typographies but now without nothing to be read there, it is now all painted in gold as an unreadable abstraction. The effect of this communicates a sensoriality or a sensorialization of the text, something also visible in another piece composed by an unreadable text of paragraphs while in this case not completely erased as in the gold one, but confused or effaced as a consequence of the juxtaposition of several different texts, in both cases the text seems to be read and perceived throught their margins, the white page space in between words and between the pattern of text and the page margins, a kind of refiguration of the text by silence, pauses and white spaces as if an overflowing of the margins on the text 

  This is something that remember Cage accents on silence and or on not sound over sound as well as Barthes clamming’s of the pleasure of the text, while there is in it also evolved another antinomy, that one between the conceptual and the abstract

   Concepts are out of doubt abstracts but they are also paradoxically at the same time full of meanings, contents, sense, discourse and enuntiations, while abstraction is far to content in favor of pure form being in that sense antonymic to concept throught the relation between form and contents. If it is completely abstract then it is pure form far to the meanings that a concept, even being abstract, evolve.

   Although abstract itself here the concept seems to be diluted in form but nor without at the same time be disseminated or redistributed in the sensoriality of forms as if atomizing it within multiple diminute grains meeting it already disseminated with a more semantic sense of content understanded as open atmospheres of senses and less as something well delimited or cutted around concrete concepts as it was in his previous more ritual works. This is by instance a meeting again with rituality now in a more minimalistic sense out or less related with culturalized or religious contents.

      In this sense we can interpret some of his pieces from the paradoxical relation between nature and culture as a continuity-discontinuity phenomenon, when the pure state of nature and the state of culture seems to be both united and separated. I am thinking here again about “From the interior of the earth”, all of this piece, in fact, are at the end landscapes and the distribution of rare objects over the earth surface suggest the possibility of moving out to the surface an interior earth sound

   Derrida sustained that speaking as a phonetic act can be considered the first and more near to nature form of social institution. Certainly, on the one hand, speaking made the transmission of langue possible which is itself an inscribed tradition, but on the other hand, speaking can be also seen as the first transformation of an unarticulated natural sound such as onomatopeyic pronunciations, laughter and shouts in articulated words, so that the first fould between nature and culture is originated in speach, we have yet a preservation in this first fould of the state of nature under culture but upside down, when state of nature and state of culture are both united and separated

   

   Is ultimately Vincench claiming a primigeneus sense of silence ancient and or originary than speech? or it is all again about nonverbal silence as suggested in his piece “The fish die from the mouse”? or yet about again the primacy of margins white pages and pauses as usually excluded from the text but that usually surrounds it given to it its exterior consistency and definition now overflowed over the text to assume it’s all space erasing contents and transforming the text in the space of pure abstract sensoriality?, I think it is mainly about gest and sensorialities

      In fact, there are many pieces from the past in which gest was not yet seen by inscription nor statified by the cold image of inscribed dissection, as for example his “Symbolic clues” defined as a kind of weaves of a kind of folk, it is also clear in “The departure” as well as in “To go and pick up my naked image” and in “To go and pick up my fiction”.

    “From the interior of the earth” are also gesturals with the entrance of hand gestural writing on canvases, the attention to the antinomies of gesture and inscription started from the serie “Paintings of action”

   I see three moments in Vincench art definition of its own language and style, on the one hand the “Symbolic clues”, “From resistance to folklore”, “research and market”, it was the exploration of a kind of visual folk defined by the relation between the hands made identity of the finger clues creating with the repetition of it a kind of wave of finger clues as if an artesany from tradition evoquing to me identities in formation, on the second hand “From the interior of the earth” explores memory in a way that subtly remember kieffer, this are pieces based in layers plastic densities and ductility in which gesture mix with writing, text and the image of time through landscapes, and finally his recent neogeometric abstractions in gold such as “Statistics”, “Inercy” and “Painting of actions” including the bricks.

 There is also an interesting symbolic relation between text and death which can be perceived in one of the pieces of “From the interior of the earth” serie when the image of graves appears behind the emblematic icon of columns of text in the backgrounds

   According to Derrida analysis of sign in Hegel, the sign itself is related with death as obvious in Egyptian pyramids inscriptions on stones, however it is not as much sign itself considered as one by one single elements which connect with the symbolism of death but more directly the idea of text, in fact, through the sign seem from writing, we still have the vestiges, reminiscences and clues of alive speech act, a succession of signs looking at a text read as writing are yet connected or related with the gestural performance that made it, writing itself can still be defined as  a performance less ritual than speech act synchronicity relation with an immediate audience and the constant presence of others proximity, situational communication and senses r

     Although more lineal and sequential than speach, there is yet however in writing something of the gesture that made it, it is true that in writing we have the lost or the lack of the face to face relations, it is in a certain sense the beginning of isolation when the audience is substituted by an imagined other which in language work as an interpretant, it is a send to someone we don’t know as well as something cutted from contexts toward transportation, but even considered as a such proffered phenomenon, we still have in writing something of the soul of alive speech at least through sense and meanings, the symbolic relation with death seems then to be more related with writing considered as a text and the signs seen textuality, while, we always have the possibility to revert that logic by using the textual conscience or awareness of inscription to gaze back the non-textual textually in a form that works out of inscriptural death

      This is pivotal from the moment we realize the major place that single words play in Vincench art, a single word in fact is directly related with speach act and symbolize it, in speaking we never compose words from the sense of a whole, only in writing composition we subordinate single words to the circulation of grammatical forms when words are just diminute elements of a general sense, only in speach act each single word consérvate their relevance, most of the Vincench work as notably obvious are base around one by one words and we should also consider that the african religions alluded in several of his earlier works with regards such as ifa,  Regla de ocha are mainly dependent of speech memory to its social reproduction

  We should pay attention for example to how sentences entrance and itinerate through the canvas in “The symbolic clues” series

   Now back to recent abstractions, 

   Besides the relation between abstraction and concept may also be interpreted here from the perspective of twenty century abstractionism by examining its coincidences as well as differences given the notorious recent turn of his art to abstractionism

   Abstraction appeared in art as a reaction to representation. Representation afforded reality through perceptive and illusionist mimesis and reflects, but as soon as many concepts of realism are themselves autonomics in the ways to assume the relation between language and reality, abstraction reacted as another way far from representation and instead turned to the interiority of abstracted subjectivity, its principles in sensibility, perception and the spirit, exploring desfamiliarization and extracotidianization of mundane quotidian or familiars on the opposite side of routine, it was also nearly related with looking for a form of visual sign which like in music and architecture is not needed and or depending of representing reality

  Vincench abstractionism are of a  neo-geometric kind, the idea of surface and arithmetic planes play a forefront role in it but at the same time according to the priorized symbolism of colour something that remember Malevich suprematism more than the geometrical abstraction of Mondrian and still or the expressionist one of Klee and Kandinsky, the second one kind of abstractionism focused in the abstract relation between rationality and spirit, and the thirst one in the interior states of subjectivity and the I, while the first attributed logical connotations of concepts inside perception attributing conceptual meanings to colour as in white on white or black on white. 

  In fact, such an attitude of developing an abstraction in which the colour is always the same one is directly related to Malevich far to the aleatorism and fractality that abstraction finded within abstract informalism. The relation with Malevich is also obvious and explicit in the way abstract reflection meet with religion, the gold as used by Vincench, in fact, is generally used in architectural decorations of churches and in the techniques of making cristian religious icons

   There is by the way a point of relation between abstraction and concept, both are referred to an abstracted idea of the spirit in its own interiority, both are related with taking distance to the physical world from the dematerialization and inmaterialization of the abstracted states of conscience, awareness, subjectivity and the I, in that sense concept and abstraction are complimentary just like red and green, blue and orange are in the universe of colour, however, at the same time, both are paradoxically autonomics, abstraction is pure form, concept is sense, semantique and content even when this contents are abstracts versus representational. 

   The relation with the object is also different in between both, a concept is an abstract representation of an object in the subject, abstraction means in the opposite way the disolvences of subject and object, when it is abstract it is paradoxically concrete because it is nor other thing than object itself in all its sensorial proximity, abstraction is always surface, proximity, the object is diluted in the subject and subjectivity diluted in the object, the conceptual in reverse, is defined by the well contrasted relation between subject and object even when in an abstract nonrepresentational manner. 

   I don’t remember in Cuban abstractionism a neosuprematic case as in Vincench, the only reference can be a certain sense that abstraction acquired between some of us in the second half of the eighties when we conceived the exhibit of abstract art as an attitude response to the sociocultural moment, an exhibit which was never made because the suspicious of the institutions something about which Desiderio following us with a same attitude ironically published at la gazeta magazine his text “recently concluded the abstract art exhibit”, an empty text, without writing, text or contents, with only dots suspended as flouting in the white empty page with footnotes as if

References

Derrida Jacques, El Pozo y la pirámide: Introduction a la semiología de Hegel, márgenes de la filosofía, catedra, also in Margins of Philosophy, the university of chicago press