13 de septiembre de 2023

Sandra Szkolnik. "Folds" (English version) *

 

This exhibition is the result of the methodical and constant investigation Sandra Szkolnik (Lima, Peru, 1968) has been carrying out for more than four years regarding the expressive possibilities of lines and volumes generated by straight folds.

Early on, Szkolnik was inspired by origami, but her interests were not directed at the construction of figures—as in the traditional Japanese technique—but to the behavior of the regular modules that are progressively created by folding.

Within this apparently simple—but certainly infinite—focus of exploration, the artist traced the routes of what would be the visual formulations of her creative practice. In this, research on materials has been fundamental. The triangular modules, the basis of her language, needed to acquire not only physical consistency but also to adequately express the artist's studied chromaticism. In addition, the flexibility of folds had to be manifested.

Additionally, Szkolnik's work updates the tensions established by flat and three-dimensional modular developments, as we see in her Folds, but also in her Unfolds, or in pieces such as Folded Connections, where the volume is barely tangible. 

Fold & Unfold/Black and White, 2023. Acrylic laminated, vinyl, and plexiglass.


Folded Connections/Canyon and Beige, 2023. Acrylic laminated, vinyl, and plexiglass


Szkolnik also incorporates a haptic game between real and suggested possibilities of the viewer's intervention. Although her first pieces were made so that spectators could arrange them “in their own way” using magnets on a flat surface—a device that is still used in her small-format production—, the artist has regulated this intervention in her later work, establishing tensions between the invitation to be manipulated generated by the folded forms and the real possibilities of manipulation. Although the Monochromatic Folds are attached with magnets, they only permit a minimal intervention; the Folded Modules or the sculptures titled Standing Folds are static volumes, mimetic folds that, nevertheless, maintain the dynamic potential of these tensioned bodies. The exhibition includes the piece Folds in Connected Panels, whose three-dimensional modules can be repositioned with respect to the flat slats in the background.

Monochromatic Folds (RubyGraphite and Deep Blue). 
All: 2002. Acrylic laminated, vinyl, plexiglass, stainless steel and magnets

Folded Modules (Silver and Blue/Blue, Silver and Red/Red, Silver and Red/Blue, and Silver and Red/Silver)

All: 2023. Acrylic laminate, vinyl, fiberglass and magnets.


Standing Folds/White and Orange, 2023. Acrylic laminate, vinyl, aluminum, and quartz


Standing Folds/White and Green, 2023. Acrylic laminate, vinyl, aluminum, and quartz


Szkolnik actualizes in her work a deep interest in constructing a grammar of space, in which volumetric and flat, visible and invisible, expanded and folded, multiplied and divided forms, would make up the signs to be interpreted.

In these reflections, the artist has incorporated the study of rhizomatic developments proposed by philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Her pieces are, in her words, “rhizomatic moments” in which there is neither a linear growth nor a center, but a tree-like and multiple progress that, in some way, relates them to the psychological, social and cultural realities of the contemporaneity.

This text was originally written for the exhibition of the same name, curated by me and held at Imago Art in Action. Miami, September 9, 2023-January 7, 2024.  

© Katherine Chacón



Sandra Szkolnik. "Folds" *

 


La exposición «Folds» es el resultado de la metódica y constante indagación que Sandra Szkolnik (Lima, Perú, 1968) viene llevando a cabo, desde hace más de cuatro años, en torno a las posibilidades expresivas de las líneas y volúmenes generados por pliegues rectos.

Tempranamente, Szkolnik fue inspirada por el origami, pero sus intereses no estuvieron dirigidos a la construcción de figuras —como en la tradicional técnica de papiroflexia japonesa— sino al comportamiento de los módulos regulares que, progresivamente, crean los dobleces.

Dentro de este aparentemente simple —pero ciertamente infinito— foco de exploración, la artista trazó las rutas de lo que serían las formulaciones plásticas de su práctica creativa. En ésta, ha sido fundamental la investigación sobre los materiales. Los módulos triangulares, base de su lenguaje, requerían adquirir no sólo consistencia física sino expresar adecuadamente el estudiado cromatismo de la artista. Además, la flexibilidad del doblez debía hacerse manifiesta.

Por otra parte, la obra de Szkolnik actualiza las tensiones que establecen los desarrollos modulares planos y tridimensionales, como lo vemos en sus Pliegues, pero también en sus Desplegados, o en piezas como Pliegues conectados, donde el volumen es apenas tangible.

Plegado y desplegado/Blanco y negro, 2023. Acrílico laminado, vinil y plexiglás


Pliegues conectados/Terracota y beige, 2023. Acrílico laminado, vinil y plexiglás


Szkolnik incorpora, asimismo, un juego háptico entre las posibilidades reales y sugeridas de intervención del espectador. Si bien sus primeras piezas fueron realizadas para que éste las dispusiera ‘a su gusto’ y usando imanes sobre una superficie plana —dispositivo que se mantiene aún en su producción de pequeño formato—, la artista ha regulado esta intervención en su obra posterior, al establecer tensiones entre la invitación que generan las formas plegadas a ser manipuladas y las posibilidades reales de manipulación. Los Pliegues monocromáticos aunque están sujetos con imanes, pueden solo ser objeto de una mínima intervención; los Módulos plegados o las esculturas tituladas Pliegues al vuelo son volúmenes estáticos, pliegues mimetizados que, no obstante, mantienen la potencialidad dinámica de estos cuerpos tensionados. La exposición incluye la pieza Plegados en paneles conectados, cuyos módulos tridimensionales pueden ser cambiados de posición respecto a los listones planos del fondo.

Pliegues monocromáticos (RubíGrafito Azul profundo). 
Todos: 2002. Acrílico laminado, vinil, plexiglás, acero inoxidable e imanes


Módulos plegados (Plateado y azul/Azul, Plateado y rojo/Rojo, Plateado y rojo/Azul y Plateado y rojo/Plateado). 

Todos: 2023. Acrílico laminado, vinil, fibra de vidrio e imanes


Pliegues al vuelo/Blanco y anaranjado, 2023. Acrílico laminado, vinil, aluminio y cuarzo


Pliegues al vuelo/Blanco y verde, 2023. Acrílico laminado, vinil, aluminio y cuarzo


Szkolnik actualiza en su obra un profundo interés por construir una gramática del espacio, en la que lo volumétrico y lo plano, lo visible y lo invisible, lo expandido y lo plegado, lo que se multiplica y lo que se divide, conformarían los signos a ser descifrados.

En estas reflexiones, la artista ha incorporado el estudio de los desarrollos rizomáticos propuesto por los filósofos Gilles Deleuze y Félix Guattari. Sus piezas son, según sus palabras, «momentos rizomáticos» en los que no hay un crecimiento lineal ni un centro, sino un progreso arbóreo y múltiple que, de algún modo, las relaciona con las realidades psicológicas, sociales y culturales de nuestra contemporaneidad.

Este texto fue escrito originalmente para presentar la exposición homónima curada por mí y realiada en Imago Art in Action, en Miami, del 9 de septiembre de 2023 al 7 de enero de 2024. 

© Katherine Chacón



21 de julio de 2022

Francisco Masó: Surreptitious Stripes*

 

"I dream of the intellectual who destroys evidence and generalities, the one who, in the inertias and constraints of the present time, locates and marks the weak points, the openings, the lines of force, who is incessantly on the move ... who, wherever he moves, contributes to posing the question of knowing whether the revolution is worth the trouble, and what kind (I mean, what revolution and what trouble.)”

Michel Foucault, Power and Sex

 

Francisco Masó
http://archivoartstudio.com/about/

 

SURREPTITIOUS STRIPES: FRANCISCO MASÓ

Surreptitious Stripes brings together two polyptychs from the series An Aesthetic Register of Covert Forces that Cuban artist Francisco Masó has been conceptualizing since 2016. The works have been conceived as volumes of twenty pages in which paintings of an abstract-geometric configuration are individually displayed. Structured in horizontal and parallel lines of flat and vivid colors that follow a repetitive scheme, the works update elements characteristic of geometric painting, which places Masó as one of the few exponents of this trend within current Cuban art.

Formally, An Aesthetic Register falls within the line of research of “cold” abstraction, reiterating its orthogonal resolutions and intense contrasts of color. Masó’s work has a connection to a long tradition in Latin American art which has important production centers in Venezuela, Argentina and Brazil and, to a lesser extent, Colombia and Mexico. In Cuba, this work continues the investigations inaugurated in the middle of the 20th Century by the group “The Ten Concrete Painters”—Pedro Álvarez, Wifredo Arcay, Mario Carreño, Salvador Corratgé, Sandú Darié, Luis Martínez Pedro, Alberto Menocal, José Mijares, Pedro de Oraá, José Ángel Rosabal, Loló Soldevilla y Rafael Soriano— as well as those carried out in exile by artists such as Carmen Herrera and Waldo Balart.

Francisco Masó. De la serie "Registro estético de fuerzas encubiertas", página 6, volumen II, 2017.
Cortesía del artista

In spite of the abstract formulation of its language, Masó’s work does not look to the formal self-referential, optical-kinetic, or transcendent aspirations that have evolved from the programs of the already-extensive tradition of international geometric painting.

Instead, Masó uses his artistic skills to develop a methodological platform to carry out a critical observation of reality that allows him to unveil some clues of standardized sociopolitical phenomena.

 

Discipline and Punish

 An Aesthetic Register of Covert Forces has as its starting point photographs and videos of episodes of social control that have occurred, and still occur, in contemporary Cuba. These show street altercations between people who function in a confusing environment. It is only because the images have been extracted from “resistance media” that it is known that these incidents are not isolated disturbances among the civilian population but rather disciplinary actions involving covert agents.

Following clues arising from the complex psychosocial framework that is part of the mechanics of totalitarianism, Masó has identified in the previously-mentioned audiovisual documents a continuing recurrence of linear color patterns in the clothing worn by the agents of social control. These garments are polo shirts imported by the government and distributed among workers of the various political bodies. Their use is common, and it establishes a quiet, subconscious, difference between those who wear them and those who do not. Somehow, they represent “correctness,” an adherence to the norm or to an imposed truth. In the context of the vigorous control episodes, the polo shirts become undercover uniforms although they are not identified as such by the public.

Francisco Masó. De la serie "Registro estético de fuerzas encubiertas", página II, volumen 1, 2017.
Cortesía del artista



Francisco Masó. De la serie "Registro estético de fuerzas encubiertas", página 3, volumen II, 2017.
Cortesía del artista

Examining the control apparatus that utilizes them, the polo shirts are substitutes for the simpler prison panopticon.[1] The abstract functioning of this mechanism, by which the fact of “seeing without being seen” guarantees not only the exercise of control and domination but also the imposition of a standardized behavior and a rational that supports it, is embodied in the practice of surreptitious control discovered in the documentary material previously referred. The panopticon here is this covert force that sees all but remains invisible, at least for the majority.

The “societies of control” described by Gilles Deleuze[2] are displacing, however, this model. They update, unlike more primitive disciplinary societies, a modern panopticon device backed by computer science and its sophisticated locating mechanisms—cameras, satellites, and automated intelligence networks— that facilitates control of the individual without using physical repression or isolation.  

But, for third-world totalitarian systems as in Cuba, there is not adequate sophistication, since they aim to enforce a political field of open asymmetry resorting to populist fanaticism and parapolice surveillance as a form of control/repression[3]. Thus promoting the emergence of a paranoid society. Like the Bentham’s prison model, these systems also utilize cheap resources. This was discussed by Jeremy Bentham when proposed the panopticon as a prison model, underlined its low cost as one of its advantages in relation to other forms of criminal control. Accordingly Foucault writes: “[The Panopticon] involves very little expense ... Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorising to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself.”[4]


Useful beauty

This totalitarian apparatus is unveiled in Masó’s Aesthetic Register. By extracting the linear patterns of the polo shirts from their real context and formalizing them, Masó not only highlights them but also makes the register a tool for their identification. The size and vertical orientation of his paintings intentionally reminds one of the shape and dimensions of the ready-for-distribution packaged shirts. The Aesthetic Register operates as a catalog for showing (enseñar in Spanish, meaning both to show and to teach) the aesthetic patterns, thus becoming an instrument to express Maso’s desire—to dismantle this totalitarian control device.

Masó is interested in, and reflects upon, a new paradigm described by Nicolás Bourriaud in his Relational Aesthetics, where the French aesthete theorizes about the incorporation of relationships and social phenomena in the contemporary artistic sphere. This interest of Masó was formed much earlier although for his early education in Cuba was at the Cátedra Arte de Conducta (Behavior Art School) which was founded in 1998 by Tania Bruguera. As Bruguera’s pupil, he became interested in the concept of “Useful Art,” a proposal that “aims to transform some aspects of society through the implementation of art, transcending symbolic or metaphorical representation and proposing with its activity some solutions for the deficits in reality.”[5] According to Bruguera, art must “look at the research of the concept as well as the potential of usefulness itself as an aesthetic category,” and “to focus on the beauty of being useful.”[6]

Accordingly, An Aesthetic Register of Covert Forces should be understood beyond the local problematic of the audiovisual documents that initiated it. Although Masó's preoccupations are notoriously political as well as social, his Aesthetic Register constitutes a tangible instrument of social change, a hoped-for transformation of reality.

Francisco Masó. De la serie "Registro estético de fuerzas encubiertas", página 9, volumen II, 2017.
Cortesía del artista

Useful Art is firmly based in the critical analysis of social phenomena and operates through long-term projects that are structured according to the results of the implementation of the strategies proposed. The notion of utopia is rejected. Useful Art looks for real, possible and viable mechanisms of implementation.

Other works by Masó including United Nations, the first chapter of his Liminal States project, share these Useful Art goals. In United Nations he utilizes an abstract-geometric language in constructions made with schematized national flags that propose the creation of new “states” to be established on the territorial borders of the countries which he visually links.

The proposal of a disruption of the strategies underlying the exercise of power that articulates the Aesthetic Register is in line with what Foucault notes regarding resistance to the panoptic structure. The French thinker writes that “resistances to the Panopticon will have to be analysed in tactical and strategic terms ... The analysis of power-mechanisms has no built-in tendency to show power as being at once anonymous and always victorious. It is a matter rather of establishing the positions occupied and modes of actions used by each of the forces at work, the possibilities of resistance and counter-attack on either side.”[7]

Additionally, the Aesthetic Register comments on formalist artistic traditions. In these works, the beauty of the colored lines and their constructive patterns is a lure that invite the viewer to contemplate the narrative of the tensions generated by a totalitarian structure which, by hiding the action of its agents, tries to confuse and discourage any possibility of resistance.

SOURCES:

Bourriaud, Nicolás. Estética relacional. Adriana Hidalgo Editora. Col. Los Sentidos/Artes Visuales, Buenos Aires, 2006.

Bruguera, Tania. (nd). Cátedra de Arte Conducta. Tania Bruguera. Recovered from: http://www.taniabruguera.com/cms/492-0-Ctedra+Arte+de+Conducta+Behavior+Art+School.htm

Bruguera, Tania. (04.23.2011). Introduction on Useful Art. Tania Bruguera. Recovered from: http://www.taniabruguera.com/cms/528-0-Introduction+on+Useful+Art.htm

Delgado, Aldeide. (12.26.2016). Abstracción sólida: la producción de Francisco Masó en el contexto de la Abstracción Latinoamericana. Arte al límite. Recovered from: https://www.arteallimite.com/2016/12/abstraccion-solida-la-produccion-francisco-maso-contexto-la-abstraccion-latinoamericana/

Foucault, Michel: "The Eye of Power" in FOUCAULT, Michel: Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews & Other Writings. 1972-1977. Ed. Colin Gordon, Pantheon Books, New York. 1980, pp. 146-165.

Masó, Francisco: Registro estético de fuerzas encubiertas, 2017. PDF Document.

Masó, Francisco: United Nations (from Liminal States Project), nd. PDF Document.

© Katherine Chacón


[1] The panopticon was a type of prison architecture devised by Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th Century. This model was studied by Michel Foucault to explain the abstract functioning of what he called “disciplinary societies.” In broad outline, the panopticon was formed by a tower located in the center of a circular building. The placing of the tower allowed the guards to observe the prisoners located in the cells around the tower without their being able to know when they were being watched. Cf. Foucault, Michel: "The Eye of Power" in Foucault, Michel: Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews & Other Writings. 1972-1977. Ed. Colin Gordon, Pantheon Books, New York. 1980, pp. 146-165.

[2] Cf. Deleuze, Gilles: Postscript on the Societies of Controlin October 59, Winter 1992, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 3-7.

[3] It is the difference between the forms of genocide of the First World, which are industrial (Nazi Germany) or technological (Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and the Third World, with its low intensity extermination (Rwanda, for example).

[4] FOUCAULT, Michel: “The Eye of the Power, in Op. cIt., p.155.

[5] BRUGUERA, Tania. (nd). Cátedra de Arte Conducta. Tania Bruguera. http://www.taniabruguera.com/cms/492-0-Ctedra+Arte+de+Conducta+Behavior+Art+School.htm

[6] BRUGUERA, Tania. (04.23.2011). Introduction on Useful Art. Tania Bruguera. http://www.taniabruguera.com/cms/528-0-Introduction+on+Useful+Art.htm

[7] FOUCAULT: Op. cit., p.163-164.

Translation: Jim Peele

* This text was originally written for the exhibition of the same name and published in the catalog «Surreptitious Stripes. Francisco Masó» curated by myself and by Jim Peele an presented in Connect Now Room. Art Connection Foundation, in Miami, from July 20 to August 19, 2017.

Photos of the show

Catalogue of the show