Fabric as skin, skin as metaphor

In 1998, a few months before going to Canada to begin a postgraduate course on art and teaching, a phrase took hold in my head: painting on skin. I immediately recognised its coded nature. As with certain images, this was an enigmatic message or a message-guide. There was no sense in trying to dissect it or reducing it to the parameters of rational logic; the point, as on so many other occasions, was to live with this reality: to foster its light, taking, drinking in and forgetting its trace.

My first encounter with Oriental paper took place in Toronto's Chinatown. There I encountered the first vegetal skins: the Thai sheets, membranes of toasted colour, and the silky, moon-pale Chinese rolls. The wonder of Japanese paper would come later. It was the beginning of a love affair that invited me to explore a landscape of light and texture with unknown qualities and my entire being, as I can discern it now, had to open up and transform itself to be able to converse -via water, paintbrush and paper- with these vegetal pulp fabrics.

After an intense process of pictorial creation on these papers -so alive!- and my return to Spain, a new phrase formed to describe the reality emerging from my studio: the skin of the world. What was this about? What did the skin of the world mean? I knew that in some way it referred to the knowledge that the very experience of the trip had inscribed in my consciousness. And this knowledge could only be expressed symbolically, through a metaphor that would be either verbal and/or embodied in an aesthetic object. With this phrase as my threshold -the skin of the world- I began to look for a material to form the support for the paint that had the characteristic of being, just like paper, light and translucent and unlike paper, much more resistant to environmental factors and the passage of time. This is how I began, after much trial and error, the body of geotexile fabrics that is presented in public for the first time.

This material, the geotextile, presented at times as fabrics stretched out on frames and other times floating (removed from their rigid support after I worked on them), makes it possible for me to speak -metaphorically- of the skin. The skin refers, in this case, to a specific kind of knowledge, the knowledge that is bound to the vital, irreplaceable experience of the subject; the knowledge attached to the body and its memory. On the other hand, if we pause to study the physical forms created on this support, it must be said that each fabric-skin is the result of a territory given meaning by action. And this action, well-marked by an additive process of the material-colour or by a process of a great formal synthesis defined by the line or stroke, implicitly refers to: scratch, fissure, scar, breakage, hole: reconstruction. Gaps that allow us to see and feel another reality. Reconstructed fabric: curing: the wisdom of stones, polished edges: playing. Magisterial architectures of the ephemeral, so eternal. Desire. Desire and dream. The sea, the word...

The voice, secret threads of the intangible

During the course of this project, a trip of only 14 days to Baja California, Mexico, was decisive in inspiring me to write two works of sound poetry: en el vientre de la ballena sacra -in the belly of the sacred whale- and kissing the night.
The sound poem en el vientre de la ballena sacra is related to a transformative experience -full of power, beauty and intensity- that I was only able to experience thanks to the completeness of this trip. I speak of my encounter with the Gray Whale. Indeed, spotting, hearing and touching this aquatic mammal in the lakes of southern Baja California constituted an experience whose strength and mystery significantly exceeded the old moulds of my personality. The internal process that led me to write the poem that navigates the central pages of this catalogue could be described as an implosion. It was not a linear increase of emotional flow, but rather a central, nuclear overflow; an energy that, paradoxically, with docile and loving violence, broke the old installations that until then had functioned as valid containers of my emotional reality.

Despite the uncertainty, this rupture did not lead me exactly to chaos but rather to a vital space of more depth and horizon. To write: the eye of the whale has seen me... was the equivalent of verifying the magnitude of what was happening and from this verification, I wanted to integrate this poem into a sound poem formed by different voices. The fact that most of these voices were recorded in one of the caves in the historic Sacromonte neighbourhood in Granada, the city in which I live, meant a way of integrating distances and melting, through the aesthetic object/process, realities that are normally thought of as separate and independent.

However, when the time came to give spatial specificity and technical assurance to this work within the exhibition halls of the Institute of America which I have been granted, I considered it appropriate to postpone the encounter between this poem-installation and the public. This is because this choral work cries out to be exhibited in a physical space that embodies the emotional tension and intensity that emanates from its emotive nucleus. And I discerned that only a dark dwelling, perhaps somewhat qualified, within some architecture or a simple cubicle deep in the earth and lit with zenithal light, could contain, because of the opposition or contrast, the exceptionality and limitlessness of this vital and aesthetic fantasy.

Quite differently, the sound poem kissing the night was born as an extension of the fabric that bears the same name. Although the iconography of this plastic work had already materialised in paintings and drawings made before this trip, I can affirm that the aesthetic and emotional reality that the Mexican landscape held for me was to a large extent decisive in moulding what finally took shape on the fabric. Fabric and sound poem are, this time, a single piece unfolding within two well-differentiated spheres of perception: sight and hearing.
But, what does the voice contribute to this exhibition in general and to the installation kissing the night in particular? The recorded voice in this exhibition acts as a sensorial and emotive counterpoint to the space taken in by the vision. If the white, cottony, fibrous fabrics materialise in the physical architecture of the space, silences that can contains nuances from soft or sleepy to clamorous, the voice leads us, in contrast, to highly intimate invisible and intangible spaces.

In kissing the night, the voice transmitted through headphones is word, rhythm, murmur, melody and onomatopoeia and this voice expands and steers what the pictorial image reveals: the oneiric and erotic relationship between the embodied being (breasts-mountain) and the metaphysical being (the night). A sort of existential landscape in which love is expressed in its facet of perennial desire and poetic sublimation. In this installation, the different threads of voice are sound clues that create a space marked by encounters and approximations -by intervals- in their transience; footbridges that lead us to a space recreated as night. It must be noted, also, that when the available headphones are taken from the wall, the recipient enters into a game of complicity with the piece and through this action, a space of auditory texture opens up and extends beyond the image.

Furthermore, the impossible translation or equivalence that exists between vision and sound creates a sound dis-ruption that turns kissing the night into an aesthetic object that is difficult to grasp. The temporal dimension of the narrated poem collides unreservedly with the timeless immobility of the image. The unsalvageable space that exists between these two realities breaks, or at least alters, the aura of unity to which the other pieces in the exhibit aspire. Finally, it can be said that in this installation, sound is a crater or tunnel that adheres to any of the many pores in the fabric; the represented image, a small island of consistency next to the sweet abyss of the voice.