The Games end today, I’m going back to work tomorrow. I have enjoyed the two-week break. I’ve kept myself busy, floating at home between my canvases and the laptop. On one side of my flat, cutting magazines for my collages, arranging colors for future large pieces, and in the other room, doing the same, but with words on the screen as I slice souvenirs edited by memory.
I’m quite fond of the principle of re-assemblage in all aspects of life. Interested in how parts can be refitted differently. Take a landscape from the National Geographic and shred it to pieces each not larger than one centimeter. Nothing recognizable from the original, except for the hues. Then recombine these into a face. Little dots piled up to create an eye, a shadow next to the nose, a double-chin, wrinkles running down the mouth.
Now take hundreds of pages from the National Geographic and build a huge rendition of an imagined city by night, flakes of printed paper glued to imitate the strokes of a brush by an anonymous painter, the representation of a non-existing representation.
Details, precision, small patches of colors conjugated into new sequences. A careful pause at each shade to contemplate distribution’s infinite possibilities. Having to reach a decision. Testing, often a mad undertaking, combinations and effects, how far gradations go, how to feign them, how to interrupt them. To survey light, altering the spectrum because it’s early the morning or late the afternoon. Light bulbs the evening causing a mutation, halogen another. Examining how the work changes according to the hours or the climate, what happens on cloudy days as opposed to sunny ones. How distance influences, what’s to be seen up close, the fine line that appears from far away. Regrets at having to choose and immobilize with glue the rotation of the wheels seen in my eye as bits of ink pigments try each other out. If I can, I'll work on a project for a year, two when I cut the paper smaller.
This is what I like to do. This is what I would be doing all day if I didn’t have to make a living and pay monthly bills. This is what I’ve enjoyed doing since childhood. Re-indexing colors, re-establishing forms, re-cataloguing reds into browns, grays into blues, blacks into greens, pastels, vivid tints, finding a wide range of whites that aren’t. Playing, bluffing, disguising yellow into a bright purple, fabricating certainties that rest on simulations. Over and over again, lured by limitless visual scenarios.
Surprised at my ability to endure pain whenever I complete a piece, no room left to add a combination, no space available to extend ramifications, no more odds, probabilities. No sequel to the red or green. Finished. Always difficult, unacceptable. Because I wasn’t myself quite finished. There were still undeveloped, feasible assortments dangling at the edge of my iris. More selections awaiting consideration. Frustrated at the size of the canvas, never large enough to expose all the angles we can use substituting this for that, confronting distant ploys, curious as to how they’ll get along.
Surfaces with an autonomy of their own. Escapades out of my control. Acts of independence, a spirit of mutiny, textures always prone to insurrection, fashioning results all my efforts at technique and discipline won’t foresee, won’t harness. And it is to reach that unique moment that I work for, when the structure carefully tested and ordered unleashes itself, slips away, and detonates in total insubordination.
My hands by then full of blisters from scratching glues, varnishes and rivers of hardened transparent acrylic. Every bone in my body wrapped in over-heated waves of soreness. An attestation I was there all along. My signature within the anatomy.
Laolao
I’m quite fond of the principle of re-assemblage in all aspects of life. Interested in how parts can be refitted differently. Take a landscape from the National Geographic and shred it to pieces each not larger than one centimeter. Nothing recognizable from the original, except for the hues. Then recombine these into a face. Little dots piled up to create an eye, a shadow next to the nose, a double-chin, wrinkles running down the mouth.
Now take hundreds of pages from the National Geographic and build a huge rendition of an imagined city by night, flakes of printed paper glued to imitate the strokes of a brush by an anonymous painter, the representation of a non-existing representation.
Details, precision, small patches of colors conjugated into new sequences. A careful pause at each shade to contemplate distribution’s infinite possibilities. Having to reach a decision. Testing, often a mad undertaking, combinations and effects, how far gradations go, how to feign them, how to interrupt them. To survey light, altering the spectrum because it’s early the morning or late the afternoon. Light bulbs the evening causing a mutation, halogen another. Examining how the work changes according to the hours or the climate, what happens on cloudy days as opposed to sunny ones. How distance influences, what’s to be seen up close, the fine line that appears from far away. Regrets at having to choose and immobilize with glue the rotation of the wheels seen in my eye as bits of ink pigments try each other out. If I can, I'll work on a project for a year, two when I cut the paper smaller.
This is what I like to do. This is what I would be doing all day if I didn’t have to make a living and pay monthly bills. This is what I’ve enjoyed doing since childhood. Re-indexing colors, re-establishing forms, re-cataloguing reds into browns, grays into blues, blacks into greens, pastels, vivid tints, finding a wide range of whites that aren’t. Playing, bluffing, disguising yellow into a bright purple, fabricating certainties that rest on simulations. Over and over again, lured by limitless visual scenarios.
Surprised at my ability to endure pain whenever I complete a piece, no room left to add a combination, no space available to extend ramifications, no more odds, probabilities. No sequel to the red or green. Finished. Always difficult, unacceptable. Because I wasn’t myself quite finished. There were still undeveloped, feasible assortments dangling at the edge of my iris. More selections awaiting consideration. Frustrated at the size of the canvas, never large enough to expose all the angles we can use substituting this for that, confronting distant ploys, curious as to how they’ll get along.
Surfaces with an autonomy of their own. Escapades out of my control. Acts of independence, a spirit of mutiny, textures always prone to insurrection, fashioning results all my efforts at technique and discipline won’t foresee, won’t harness. And it is to reach that unique moment that I work for, when the structure carefully tested and ordered unleashes itself, slips away, and detonates in total insubordination.
My hands by then full of blisters from scratching glues, varnishes and rivers of hardened transparent acrylic. Every bone in my body wrapped in over-heated waves of soreness. An attestation I was there all along. My signature within the anatomy.
Laolao
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