Javier Bassi
*Poetics of Thickness:
Landscapes of Mystery
Since the convention
about words is usually wrongly managed, we have ended up by
accepting that something mysterious is something complex,
difficult to decipher. However, mystery has nothing to do with
figures, codes or intrigues. It is the territory of what is not
known, what can never be known, what can only be touched upon.
Also, thanks to banalizing neoclassicism, it is usually believed
that a landscape is something epic, splendorously rhetorical or
luminous. However, even viewing any conventional landscape is
always the subjective reflection of whoever contemplates it and
recreates it. Thus, it has been essentially an interpretation
born from a singular and not transferable intimacy.
Perhaps that is the
reason why translating the strange landscaping by Javier Bassi
is so difficult. To explain it, describe it, try to offer
rational access strategies. Precisely because these are
landscapes coined in the geography of mystery and, therefore,
fed from intricate thickness. Silent sceneries, engrossed in
some likableness that we may feel bur that cannot be understood
nor does it accept it. It rejects being dissected and thus it
expels any uncertainty. Warmed up by a mythical fog, they claim
an almost contemplative initiation exercise guided by a serene
ritualization. It is saying with a lot of unexplainable
perception, with almost nothing of an anecdote. With a lot of
magical dazzle, with almost nothing of comfortable instructions.
They are hardly perspective insinuations and a faint awareness
of a horizon, of strange remoteness. These landscapes do not
tell a precise and invariable story. In an imperceptible manner
they want to be scenarios of any likely story, continually
changing, docile
vis-à-vis the affective
inflections of every spectator. From their serene and bare
dramatic quality, from their helpless lucidity, they try to
recall both the daily epic campaign of affections and the
persistent existential interrogation.
By
Alfredo Torres
Alfredo Torres is an Art Critic, Curator of the
Goethe Institute
*From the dictionary/Poetics, condition, charm or
quality capable of uplifting feelings or the imagination causing
an esthetical and affective emergence.
Javier Bassi
E-mail:
jbassi@adinet.com.uy
|
Felipe Secco
Ideograms of the
unconscious
"...Secco's work can be
perceived as the outcome of a language whose creation is a form
of writing. And like at the beginning of writing, the artist and
the penman are, in his case the same. This scribe produces a
series of closed ideograms or images that are independent in
appearance. But even if these signs are characterized by its
completeness, they are chained to other signs and acquire its
complete significance in the total and open discourse of his
art.
"My images are like
ideograms of the unconscious", Secco says in reference to the
process of gestation of these images.
Extracted from an
interior current in constant activity, they come to light as the
conscious and concrete materialization of a darkness were a
visual flow runs and seems to have no limits.
The sources that feed
his iconography are so varied like the cultural universes that
have obsessed him throughout the years. Among the books piled in
his workshop you can find from illustrated works of scientific
diffusion up to religious books and popular crafts, passing
through works of the artist Keith Haring and catalogues of the
Cuban Jose Bedia, along with many others. The expansion of
microscopic photographs of amebas and protozoas, millenary
petroglvphs, Mexican codices, designs of popular crafts of north
Africa, India or Mexico, Chinese ideograms, comics and the
modern logotypes, constitute in its diversity a coherent
universe in Secco's perception of the world.
Through his own images
it is possible to understand that the guide of a common language
are found in the most diverse expressions of the reality.
Secco has found a strong
nexus that conforms a powerful approach to the communicating
vessels of a totality that is perceived as chaos and disperse
for the man of this century. In this totality, the minimum part
is a representation of the whole, just like the whole is
essentially a projection of minimum elements. Like in alchemy,
the old relationship between micro and macrocosm, with all its
spiritual and humanistic connotation, passes by the interior of
the matter and denotes an image of the universe where the
representation is inseparable from 'what is represented..."
By
Sergio Altesor
"El País Cultural" N°
540. March, 2000. (A section of the Uruguayan newspaper El País)
Felipe Secco
E-mail:
felipesecco@netgate.com.uy |
