From Modal Patterns, DVD published by Kunsthaus Graz, 2006

“More than the sum of its parts.” This key formula from gestalt psychology nowadays constitutes a universally applicable platitude, whether in politics, aspects of society, ecological concerns or the arts. The phrase is trotted out on every occasion, implying that, though the individual is important, he or she or it can never account for the larger whole, the underlying idea being that it is the higher context that allocates the individual component its place, regardless of the latter’s innate qualities. In politics and society, this insight has gone hand in hand with the slow discovery of globality – an abstract and in principle intangible structure that can no way be derived from the plethora of scattered local arenas. In the arts, there has been a similar change of paradigm in recent decades. It is not the individual work that is responsible for its effect – the artistic work must be understood first of all within its context, whatever nature that may be.

Andrés Ramírez Gaviria has taken this concept of “more than the sum of its parts” – which is a kind of mantra for the information society – and carried out a series of transformations on it. For him, this is not just a matter of demonstrating the state of the art of modern data processing in a visually impressive fashion. It is more the case that Modal Patterns places this functioning itself in the context of advanced gestalt recognition, as a kind of recursive trialling of basic gestalt principles with and on itself, without this necessarily leading to self-reflexive convolutions or to wallowing in the fashionable minimalist or elegantly reduced info aesthetics of today. That this is not the case and the ongoing process of generating and decoding patterns serves first and foremost to illustrate and process information matrices is ensured by a series of very precisely co-ordinated translation steps.

To start with, Gaviria takes the core sentence back to its syntactical components, thirteen different letters (some of which occur once, some four times) plus the punctuation marks, period and slash. These fifteen basic symbols are subsequently turned into visuals, i.e. transposed into short animation sequences based on the formal principles of gestalt perception. These consist in turn, for example in relation to the figure-background principle, of white patterns on a black surface (or vice versa). Or, borrowing from the “similarity principle”, they consist of columns of moveable particles, which are perceived either as belonging together or as disjunct. The concern is always the link between the syntactical and word components, in contrast to a reductionist procedure, i.e. “holistic” connections – something that appears downright counter-intuitive as the basic syntactical elements (the letters) in Modal Patterns are no way traced back to their “nuclear” characteristics. Instead, their functioning has key status in the context of the animation sequence. A series of words is translated onto fifteen screens, each of them distinctive and yet all of them related to each other in their arrangement. Depending on their alphabetical order, every sign (every screen) is additionally furnished with a time index – a further transformational step that transfers the elementary occurrence to the temporary axis.

But it doesn’t stop there. Gaviria has also transformed the initial sentence anagrammatically, to make a kind of mirror image out of it: “a misshape of truth torments”. The anagram not only contains the original phrase in it, as is confirmed at visualisation level, since it operates with exactly the same fifteen symbols. It also throws up a semantic surplus – “truth torments”, which could refer to the platitudes of a gestalt theory that has become universally applicable; and “misshape”, which can be read as an allusion to the anagrammatic transformation and translation into animation  sequences. The misshapen transformation of a flood of truths, and at the same time the successful (and in its visual intensity, impressive) illustration of elementary principles of information processing as well – that is the gist of what Modal Patterns seems to set out to say.

How can this inner contradiction be resolved? Perhaps not at all. Perhaps it is ineluctably inscribed in the process of visualisation and can only be dissected out in its complexity, the way Gaviria does it.

Christian Höller (born 1966) is editor of springerin–Hefte für Gegenwartskunst and writes extensively on art and cultural theory. Between 2002 and 2007, he was Visiting Professor at l’École supérieure des beaux-arts in Geneva, and from 2006 to 2007, he was scientific editor of documenta 12 magazines. His curated projects include: the exhibition Hauntings–Ghost Box Media, Medienturm Graz, and the accompanying concert series Sonic Spectres, 2011

From -./, DVD published by Kunstverein Medienturm, Graz, 2006

“If it is possible to make visible the presence of electricity, I do not see why information cannot be immediately transmitted to all directions by means of electricity.” With this statement Samuel Morse commented on the invention of audiovisual electric news in 1837. The history of mechanized hearing, which gave rise to confusion and success, began. People learned to perceive intervals between impulses as letters, to convert letters and words into impulses. Morse code was also the Morse alphabet. Real-time-ranges emerged: abstract, coded spaces. In telegraphy the codes were translated ‘automatically’; loop tapes whereon only one line was written evolved, following the monotonous, acoustic loop writing, which, in a linear form, translated text into an impulse sequence. In Morse code, writing and text lost their traditional, medial body, but gained instant ranges, losing the depth of the plane in favor of a rationalized linearity.

Andrés Ramírez Gaviria sets the abstraction of the digital interface against the rationalization of the plane-script. His project recalls the deep surfaces of writing, but not as the retro-plane of a book’s page or sheet of paper. In his video, the loop-tape of the script is locked within a pulsating, diagonally structured screen. Lines are transferred to stripes, to linear planes of differing widths. Digitally generated, a plane emerges which moves within itself, a non-linear happening of sudden changes. What makes this work especially interesting is that code and plane find common ground on the basis of the Morse code: this is one of many paradoxes which the digital culture triggers worldwide in the works of artists within the spectrum of media and art. In this context, the reference to the history of art is telling. Andrés Ramírez Gaviria translates the index of Point and Line to Plane by Wassiliy Kandinsky, 1926 into an audio-visual image via Morse code. This code emerges as a generated, dynamic pattern of planes. The visible area and the audible space are designed in a way that precludes any further decoding of the sequence of signs. The signs become an intrinsic value of the artwork. The linear rationalization, the original purpose of their creation, is taken away. Thus, a work that could be described as code criticism is produced.

In the modified arrangement of the visual and acoustic code ranges, a Morse-image emerges – another paradox. It is not interference, but an interruption of linearity. Through this linearity we realize that we have to learn anew to see dynamic parallel fields and abrupt line jumps as connected. In the work of Andres Ramirez Gaviria, basic principles of rationality arise, which assume linearity, while emphasizing the compositions of complexities and herewith underline that plane and space have to be perceived, conceptualized and designed, if they are to explain and animate the dynamics of digital processes. Here is the transition from Morse code, the communicational instrument, to mediality. This mediality poses the challenge not to pass on stretching the information flood through new linearity and thus lose its context, but to understand and live the world as complex, scaled and non-scaled networks. The complexity of the screen display invites the active viewer to further thoughtful analysis.

Manfred Faßler (1949 -2021) was a German media scientist as well as a professor at the Institute for Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main.

1

Mondrian’s familiar paintings, composed of color surfaces and vertical and horizontal lines, are an attempt at renewal. Such renewal originates from, and is inherent in, an anti-aesthetic impulse: delimitation is replaced by expansion, surface by form, and relationship by object.

The titles of the paintings: ‘Composition with …’ clearly show that “composition” is programmatic: the paintings illustrate positions relating to one another in terms of color and geometry, positional relations that produce an image space. There’s no illusion, no spatial image. Image space: composition with lines and color surfaces that develops a space which cannot be delimited by the frame of the actual picture; which expands with determination; which refers outward to the next relations and conditions. Mondrian himself suggested that, “in the future we turn the naturalistic paintings, turn them around, with the painted surface facing the wall, in order to simply use them as elements for segmenting the wall.” The rectangular shapes of the turned-over paintings transfer a composition to a wall’s surface, and thus into a relationship, in which the wall is the topology of a new image concept. The lines are space; the color surfaces the matter occupying this space − an iconoclasm that transfers the paintings into an aesthetic world orientation. Space becomes the medium of abstraction, which finds its authentication in segments of the real world, such as architecture. “We see how pure beauty emerges on its own in buildings designed just for necessity and appropriateness. But as soon as luxury is added, one begins to think of art and this pure beauty is destroyed.”

Werner Hoffman spoke of Mondrian setting “the beauty of relation against the cult of the single article.” What is on display is an “anti-museum certainty of salvation postulating that art must be overcome by itself, that the creative act is to be expanded to all areas of life.”

2

Today the picture composed by Mondrian has changed as such, has become “something” different. The picture has transformed into a surface of information, a data field; it is visible as an interface or a display; it is less of an icon than a diagram. It is less the expression of “It is!” than of “It happens!”

Andrés Ramírez Gaviria has sketched a trajectory. Its dimensions are the sum of the width of the 17 paintings (the “Transatlantic Paintings”) Mondrian took with him when he emigrated from Europe to America. The trajectory projected on a wall is comparable to the system-space (Panofsky), which Edward Muybridge designed in Palo Alto in the early days of moving pictures: On a precisely segmented trajectory, the galloping horses are recorded as snapshots by photo cameras. Only this segmented space allows us to think of a cinematographic technology that creates moving serial images from motionless frames. Movement as mechanical animation. With Ramírez Gaviria, the structures of Mondrian’s paintings, which start from the left of the installation, into the field of view of the display inside, are now set in motion. It is only the geometrical arrangements we see, not the colored surfaces. This reduction allows us to return to our first consideration now: The geometrical structure of these new pictures is substantially tighter, more complex than the original one. Their program of relations, which unfold in every direction, is spatially shortened in this composition. And: They move, the grid is animated, embedded in a horizontal motion, goes through the entire trajectory and, when it arrives at the right end, it knocks against it and bounces off because this system-space still has a border, the system’s delimitation of the data field. Now the impact changes the grid’s order, its composition; it is pushed back as something that has been changed – a different structure, a different composition. Then the grid knocks against other structures and changes again, as these also transform, change, and rearrange, decompose and recompose themselves. This process repeats itself continuously; new structures arise, knock against one another, change, and partly also lose their lines, which are floating independently and freely now. At some point, one does not see any coherent structures anymore but only random “merry” mutations. Then, after a phase of acceleration, the sequences, the collisions, calm down; the elements gradually disappear, until only the white trajectory remains, and the process can start all over again.

If Mondrian tried to conceive and paint equilibrium or beauty in relation to this equilibrium, then Andrés Ramírez Gaviria lets the beauty of imbalance develop in the data field of a display. One can also speak of the beauty of ambivalence, of the beauty arising from the fact that the automatic play of the decomposition and recomposition of the lines is unpredictable and cannot be scheduled; of the beauty in asymmetrical relationships being permanently on the move; on the move to a present in which dimensions, orders, and conditions are broken up. This movement presents a “reality of being-there,” a state which unconditionally manifests itself as the result of its totalitarian predictability.

Marc Ries is a media theorist with a chair at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach. He received his doctorate in 1995 from the University of Vienna on the relationship between images and bodies. His research includes studies on photography, cinema and new media, as well as architecture and art. In 2009 he co-curated the exhibition talk talk – The Interview as Aesthetic Practice, which was shown in Leipzig, Graz and Salzburg. His most recent publication is Das Bewegte Bild des Begehrens/The Moving Image of Desire, in: Marc Ries, Bernd Kracke (eds.), On Desire (2018).

From Between Forms of Representation and Interpretation, catalog published by Onomatopee, Eindhoven, 2012.

“The thing about perfection is that it’s unknowable. It’s impossible, but it’s also right in front of us all the time. You wouldn’t know that because I didn’t when I created you.”

These words are from the final encounter between CLU and his creator in the second part of the science-fiction film Tron (2010), directed by Joseph Kosinsky and produced by Steven Lisberger, who directed the first film in 1982. The dialogue refers to the fact that CLU, with the incomplete concepts that he had inherited from his father-creator-programmer and had no tools for updating, became a predatory tyrant, even though, like his creator, he lived by the ideal of generating systems for a perfect world.

Despite the fact that references to Minimalism and abstraction are decisive in Andrés Ramírez Gaviria’s work, it is crucial to understand the many allusions the artist makes to these ideologies as part of another world view that already bears little resemblance to the conceptual frameworks and circumstances that inspired and sustained both those approaches and the reactions they produced and confronted.

Any significant engagement with geometry in contemporary artistic practice, starting from a consideration of history, demands that meaning be unravelled from the tools it resorts to and the context to which it belongs. Geometry and mathematics are always anchored in the notion of perfection but that does not mean that they are closed concepts or confined to the limits of objectivity. The use of these tools is not devoid of emotional expression.

The work of Andrés Ramírez Gaviria is wholly committed to recent advances in science, technology and cybernetics. This sole motive in many cases goes beyond the meanings, searches and theorisations that have been set up around modernity and its contradictions.

The technological progress and inquiry on which the artist bases his work are the outcome of views of reality that have broken through the boundaries encircling thought and aesthetics of the third, and later the fourth, dimension heralded by Einstein and acknowledged at the most basic level in relation to the concept of relativity. This surely implies that the images used in Andrés Ramírez Gaviria’s work are interwoven with inquiries that are more all-encompassing, complex and distant from the idea of relativity and also of the simultaneity that stimulated so many twentieth century changes in attitude and thinking.

A view of the current state of communications technologies and the reimagining they produce in the way knowledge and information can provide powerful images about the shift in meaning of notions such as time, simultaneity and relativity. This is even more true if a comparison is set up with what those same technologies offered up only a few years ago by lower capacity systems. Relationships, landscapes, political and natural boundaries, references and the very place inhabited constantly undergo drastic change with each new imaginarium used.

It is not about stating that there is currently a clear assimilation of those events and of the bases on which they rest, or that something similar had happened before. The most significant discoveries, the ones that lead humanity towards other perspectives and possibilities, trigger at the same time a multitude of chaotic events and, to that extent, they take place between contradictory exchanges.

Any discovery, on whatever scale, takes place between slow and rapid steps forward, as if between acceptance and resistance, resulting in scarce or exceptional opportunities for clearly recording the processes of change at conscious or programmed level. This means that the most intelligent analyses of the cause and determining factors of intellectual and cultural products are those that break through the host of reasons that interweave themselves in unexpected and paradoxical ways among the most imperceptible understandings, passions and intuitions.

It is vital to deduce from many angles how the shifts in meaning come about, in which connections, and in the midst of what kind of correct or incorrect interpretations.
Today, the creed of art as political commitment is finally showing its age. The concept reached its pinnacle in the decades between the 1930s and the 1990s, resulting, more often than not, in fanatical and facile distortions. It has been replaced by blind faith in the saving communion between art and science, which has already taken hold in a variety of ways at other times in history, with many examples of reductionisms that have culminated in confusing and sometimes tyrannical forms.

One of the most recent examples of this trend occurred in the period between the mid-19th and mid-20th century. The start of this historical period hinted at another reality of time led by research and the processes set in motion by industrialisation and by the appearance of photography among other products of knowledge.

The impressionists were the first to clarify, long before science, that a view was beginning to develop in which reality was perceived as relative and therefore unstable, abstract and indefinable, bringing them back to the place where the most emphatic message was being expressed in the sphere of poetry. They were modern pioneers in understanding that neither science nor perfection of techniques could reveal complete truths in their individual fields. At the same time, they understood that the scientific advances they were feeding on were in turn being fed by the revelations that studious lovers of harmony and truth were able to make.

Five decades later, the logical consequence of impressionist relativism was abstract geometry, the search for measurement and for the rule of ultimate balance that can make the ephemeral and the unstable remain through setting up recreative cycles. In the meantime, contradictory groups, their judgement clouded by objective knowledge, declared the end of painting and even of art itself. Other views chose to announce that art was reborn and veered more towards the empirical sciences, finally flowing out into various expressions of Fascism.

The revelations made by the vague and constantly fading images conjured up by 19th century visionaries took shape as mathematical formulae in the two first decades of the 20th century. The repositioning that this entailed was so huge that it took more than two decades to be absorbed in the spheres of greater educational refinement and adapted to everyday life. But despite the radically changing approaches to the physical world and even though scientific, social and even natural reflections were loudly expressing it, the theoretical bases of fields of knowledge did not vary accordingly, not even in the most critical dynamics. These dynamics continued to drag old ways of understanding the world that had been left behind, which resulted in a gradual broadening of a discursive chaos that would keep many social, scientific, cultural and aesthetic forms and processes bogged down in a painful kind of mannerism.

Understanding the way reality worked in the fourth dimension was in many ways a massive challenge, even for privileged minds, so the ideal of the relativity of time and space was embedded in discourse that contradicted it. The task of rebuilding the world according to new dimensions is so vast that, although more than a century has elapsed since the fourth was proved, the majority of the mechanics of human creation continue to operate in third dimensional logic.

Of course, artistic production and discourse have not escaped the confusion. Radical early twentieth century works, such as those by Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso and Vassily Kandinsky, have not been completely understood and therefore not bettered. They clearly exercised untold influence, but certainly not because of their deepest and truest message. The chemistry between these artists and the leading observers of their day and those from whom they inherited pioneering interpretations and forms had such a huge impact that it catapulted them outside their fellows and placed their perspective within reach of very few. They understood the physical world and everything built on it in a higher dimension than had hitherto been accepted. That dimension on which the pillars of the 20th century came into being was the fourth and with it, many operations in geometry and mathematics were redefined. Whether it is understood or not, the outlook on everything changed with the force of attraction they exercised on other practices and processes.

At present, the new pioneers claim that another seven dimensions exist. That makes eleven or twelve, or even more. The leap taken by many forms that have sensed and embraced them for several decades in various fields and advances is therefore immeasurably more powerful than the one that took place in the twentieth century, which as yet has not been fully absorbed. So it is sheer fantasy to speculate on the requirement to be up to date with the future and, therefore, also indispensable to observe and attend to the potential insertion of new options that will develop more naturally by those who perceive them most closely. Works such as those by Andrés Ramírez Gaviria navigate these new waters in a formation as yet unnamed because there is still too little awareness about what developments it is making or what its features will be. Artists like him are on the brink of a new perspective leading to

an unpredictable reappraisal of reality. But they are out there with the advantage of their conviction that there can be no balanced truth without subjectivity. This can be understood clearly in Andrés Ramírez Gaviria’s work. It sends out powerful images about the constrictions of objective approaches and of the serious shortcomings of studies in which there is no healthy circulation between the outer and the inner world, or even in which this procedure is regarded as unnecessary. This artist’s work is always an exact fusion between technological improvement and broadening of knowledge, with errors and limitations in the translation, frontiers of the objective gaze and mysteries of the space within; of what is never understood or known by means of geometric and mathematical operations and therefore always taking us by surprise when it breaks out.

In this sense, this artist’s work is a constant and wise revealer of secrets, in the habit of keeping to itself any information that inspires continuity. The greatest of these secrets, the definition of perfection, the driving force behind Andrés Ramírez Gaviria’s work, can be understood in its search as the changing and inextricably multiple and complex structure that underlies all events and that wants to be known, but always turns out to be slippery and impossible to encode.

Maria Iovino (Colombia) is a researcher, art critic and independent curator of contemporary art focused on the field of  Latin American Art.

From Between Forms of Representation and Interpretation, catalogue published by Onomatopee, Eindhoven, 2012

What happened to being at the end of modernity? What’s the last person left with? Commercially producing, lost in a web of the multi? What is or might be our purpose in being (teleology) and what might be the being of being (ontology)? This, specifically explored as technocracy, goes beyond our intrinsic being: our intrinsic, ideologically framed and socially motivated early modern purpose to being became dictated by technology as a technocratic, extrinsic purpose to being. How can we live within this being?

Where we are
Modern reconstruction drove us into constructions of feasibility. A world we imagined to be tangible, through this very feasibility, summed up the will of the multitude: their various constructive specializations and contributory efforts. It is within this sphere that our purpose in being became dominant, our world narrowed to the single, anthropocentric perspective of souls. The web spins the wheel. Physical particles circulate through abstract complexity. What once was analogue became digital, real connections became virtual ones. From metal to bits: what seemed to be tangible ended up being a work mode of the alienated production of being. The bigger picture, on the being of being, lost track of our framework. Things weren’t so simple anymore; we were unable to leave the chain of being dictated by purpose.

Post-modernism introduced the confusion of being by accepting the deconstruction of our intrinsic purposes and responsibilities and by playing with and enjoying the extrinsic diversity of particles. Ideology failed, fundamental being fell into neglect and we hid in scenarios. A booming scene of technology nerds along with unstable, electronic/digital media and seemingly endless ranges of coded forms playing with the parameters of the scope of the absolute. These technological endeavours were often brash and barely managed to infect the intrinsic being of our lives, but they infected our extrinsic sensations of the technocratic unknown. This was very apparent in the 2011 GLOW light-art festival, which coincidentally included work by Andrés Ramírez Gaviria. As was evident here, people at ease with their take on purpose don’t bother with intrinsic quests for materialisation, but they do crave extrinsic technological promises by technologically dictated matter when they are overwhelmed by them. Meanwhile, a scene of alternatives, including many artists, lined up to voice the inherent fruits of the intrinsic via craft, material tactility and the recent rise of the amateur’s call to direct, sincere and low-end egalitarian anarchy.

The intrinsic is at play here: if our imagination’s responsibilities are neglected we cannot exploit its productive mode. Our intrinsic sense of purpose is circulating around the lure of deconstruction and anarchy, conservatively turning to analogue being, while our extrinsic one is becoming digital and technocratic. Basically this adds together a production of being through emotional confusion and epistemological deviation.

Between Forms of Representation and Interpretation

We’re surrounded by data, wrapped up in bodies of interpretation. As utterance, forms are primarily speech acts. They manifest themselves (locutionary acts). As such, right there at that moment, objects formed by humans – artefacts – first of all relate. Like any other artefact, the physical nature of Andrés Ramírez Gaviria’s work releases a voice through production: it suggests meaning and activates interpretation. The signs of this body can be read beyond the implicit and the sense of what so far has been unconscious, turning it into an embodiment that is conscious and aware (illocutionary act).

Although we might be lost in translation, puzzled and unable to read the algorithms or reach out to the presumed absolute of the motives that produced the artefacts in the first place, we enhance our sense of belonging within this very body, without reaching the level of dominance.

I’ve always been greeted with a feeling of frustration when I’m faced with Gaviria’s work. He doesn’t allow the logic of the algorithm, the programmed texts, variously coded in his works (hidden behind intensely flashing light bars in between forms of representation and interpretation) to speak out, to reveal their message. I’m more practically inclined and feel I need to be left with a tangible result (perlocutionary act). Nevertheless, the complexity of the locutionary act in these works is too complex to read – except perhaps for the technocratic autistic. Only the implied idea of meaning, an intention of communication manifested artistically, a voice that acts via the senses of the body of technology comes through. But that is actually the artist’s intention: you’re not relating to any message, you’re relating to the motives that leave you between forms of representation and interpretation.

Where to go, in here?

It takes courage to tackle the challenges thrown up by this state of disorder. It requires the ability to speak in between languages of the intrinsic and the extrinsic beyond the analogue and the digital, ignoring both coded and un-coded communication but voicing the relation that is the sum of this being; to release the particles not through themselves, but to position them in themselves. To hold a mirror up to this scene that is neutral to both intrinsic and extrinsic purposes, accessible for both to grasp, requires being sound in this sum. Highly political, beyond the order of what we are and how we’ve made our being, into a void of the unknown, Andrés Ramírez Gaviria’s work allows for ontological dynamics, relying upon technological poetics and people’s ability to situate themselves within this being’s settings through responsive sensory capacities. When aware and adoptive, both intrinsic and extrinsic acts can expand our being through them. This would run through our being instead of through operating: altering the purpose of acts into processes of sensibility. Did we just commute our extrinsic… Is the connection made?

Damn…I really have to buy that Ipad to access and see for myself: I don’t want to be such a dreadfully conservative, art-minded sicko…

Freek Lomme is founding director and publisher of Onomatopee, a curating and editorially led public gallery and publisher. Lomme is also e freelance curator, lecturer, moderator and writer.

From A Line, However Short, Has an Infinite Number of Points, catalogue published by Triton, Barcelona/Vienna, 2016

“Another language another way of speaking so quietly always there in the shape of memories, thoughts, feelings, which are extra-marginal outside of primary consciousness, yet must be classed as some sort of unawakened finite infinite articulation. … To exist is one thing, to be perceived another.”¹

– Susan Howe, The Quarry

A preposition, when used with a noun or pronoun, indicates direction, location, or time. To place alongside. Near, nearby, next to. In regard to, together with, toward. What I am about to write is about relationships between things. About, after, around, owing to. A line has an infinite number of points. The consideration here is how to connect some of them.

Andrés Ramírez Gaviria’s Beyond Black (2010 -), is a “nano-size grid on glass,” a work in which we see a black monochrome surface, and we are told that it is—at the level of one-billionth of a meter—something much more complex, consisting of a tight grid of invisible-to-the-eye lines. At the nanometer level, the grid we cannot see underpins this apparent blackness, destabilizing the visual information our eyes perceive. Once we are told that something is beneath that impenetrable black, that it breaks down, we are beset by more existential questions. This is a poignant metaphor for artistic process, for history writing, for information technology and how we understand it, for social and racial categories. There are countless things we cannot immediately see.

We have to trust that the nanometer grid exists under the blackness. Maybe it doesn’t matter if it is actually there or not. We decide to agree that it is there.

In her most recent book of essays, poet Susan Howe unlocks connections across disparate points of American cultural history and her own personal history. She writes about grief, but also about perception, about time, about memories and lived experience, and about how language can bear a relationship to these things. Language is the preposition in this case, the thing that points toward something. Language is not the thing itself. Rather, it is an indicator. Howe’s essay “Sorting Facts,” is presumably about film, though it expands into an essay about grief and memory, history and its holes. Film’s structure, with its cuts and layers of visual clips, its montages and jumps that we organize and make sense of almost unconsciously by now, offers rich parallels to Howe’s poetry, in which she directs her readers to the structure of language itself. As one critic writes: “by asking us to focus on the tangible presence of language itself—on the morphemes, phonemes and graphemes that words are made of—Howe moves us away from our tendency to think in abstractions… We are asked to see and hear the shapes and sounds of the words instead of reading through them to what they supposedly refer to.”2

In Between Forms of Representation and Interpretation (2015), Gaviria breaks down the text of his exhibition’s press release into a series of light patterns made by flashing LED light tubes on two triangular forms. Howe writes, “Somewhere I read that relations between sounds and objects, feelings and thoughts, develop by association; language attaches to and envelops its referent without destroying or changing it—the way a cobweb catches a fly.”3 Using the cultural systems we devise to understand the world around us (i.e. science, technology, language, music), Gaviria takes one set of information and remakes it in another system. One system of ordering knowledge is the cobweb; the thing it catches is the fly. One kind of information told through another system becomes something entirely other: the information becomes different. How do we reconstitute the fly?

A pioneer in the field of information theory, Claude Shannon writes in his A Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948), “the fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point.”4 How can one communicate information in a way not determined by meaning, Gaviria asks. In the end, decoding the press release from the flashing lights of Between Forms does not expand what the work is capable of doing; it does not elucidate your experience to uncover what exactly the press release says. The transmission into another system is the point, is the art, is the idea, all at once. In Gaviria’s homage to Shannon, A Mathematical Theory of Information (2015), the artist reorganizes the mathematician’s original text, maximizing the information in it at the expense of its meaning. Or perhaps the translation heightens how the text can mean, allowing for a way of reading that actually enacts Shannon’s theory. And yet, by taking the theory at its word, Gaviria makes Shannon’s original meaning almost indecipherable. It becomes, instead, a visual representation—perhaps a performance—of an idea. As viewers, we see the representation of the idea, yet the details of Shannon’s theory are obscured. Gaviria’s book exists in a kind of liminal space: it acts between the articulation of the idea and its meaning, between the thing itself and how we can show it to someone else. It is a prepositional mode.

Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915), a significant precedent for Gaviria’s Beyond Black, radically reinvented what paint on a canvas could represent and how we understand the monochromatic. With it, Malevich made something that was not representational of the object-world surrounding him: “trying desperately to free art from the dead weight of the real world, I took refuge in the form of the square,” Malevich writes. His abstraction was premised upon a “world of feeling,” rather than upon a world of objects. He writes, “The black square on the white field was the first form in which non-objective feeling came to be expressed. The square = feeling, the white field = the void beyond this feeling.”5

There are countless things we cannot immediately see.

For Resonance (2006-2008), Gaviria attaches himself to a heart monitor and connects it to a loudspeaker in a gallery. The speaker plays the sound of his heartbeat as he goes about his days and nights elsewhere, creating an abstract, pulsing self-portrait. The heart is not only the central human muscle, powering all the movement of the body. It is also the symbolic center of human emotional life. This rhythmic self-portrait, then, abstracts an entire world of feelings.

One thing about Gaviria’s work is its relationship to translation and transparency. Much of the work takes a concept from one field—perhaps mathematics, or code, or film—and represents it through another medium. If you do not realize that the throbbing sound of Resonance is Gaviria’s heartbeat translated into sculpture, how might you engage with the work? How else might it exist? Sometimes the artist will describe the translation for you; sometimes a curator will outline the subtext. Other times, you are left to your own devices. “A lot of the work can go undetected,” Gaviria says to me. The question is how much to disclose, and how much to leave open. “There is no one way of communicating something.” How we understand the unfamiliar, the unreadable, the unexplained, tells us much about how we relate to others.

Malevich writes about the sensation of disorientation, of confusion, of frustration among the viewers who first saw his Black Square. “Yet the general public saw in the non- objectivity of the representation the demise of art and failed to grasp the evident fact that feeling had here assumed external form,” Malevich writes.6 Paintings that portray recognizable things—landscapes, portraits, genre scenes—allow a different kind of connection, as well as a different conceptualization of what art does. For his viewers, the removal of these familiar indicators led to a sense of dislocation. There was an overwhelming sense of confusion about how to relate to this black painting. After Malevich’s death, Black Square went unseen for decades, as Stalin’s social realism became the official state-sanctioned art of Soviet Russia. It is worth noting that fascist governments almost always prefer social realism: visions of wholesome, national citizens provide a one-dimensional relationship. Either you belong to that world or you don’t. The implication of Gaviria’s work is that all modes of belonging are subjective, are complex, and are premised upon emotional lives and other forms of knowledge. When we open ourselves to different languages, when we allow for different modes of saying, we allow for a more complex way of being. We relate to others differently. We find new forms of how art can mean in the world. Meaning—not at all fixed, actually—is an attempt at describing how we understand ourselves in the worlds we make. It is a structure for making sense of things.

“Pleasure springs from the sense of fluid sound patterns phonetic utterance excites in us. Beauty, harmony, and order are represented by the arrangement, and repetition, of particular words on paper,”7 Howe writes. Gaviria’s works follow a certain consistent set of questions across his career, even as they tackle diverse visual and conceptual propositions. How do we make meaning? How do we understand? How do we share information? What gets lost in the process? How can image, language, and sound illuminate important truths about our code-oriented world? Within, around, upon, near, alongside: Gaviria makes moments of poetry in the spaces between the systems we use to communicate with each other. That is to say, he works in the spaces that prepositions try to fill. Even in the seemingly meticulous, structured worlds of mathematics or code, Gaviria’s works leave open a space. What you, dear viewer, make of this open space is limitless in its imaginative potential, in its points of connection. And that, really, is what poetry offers us.

1 Susan Howe, The Quarry (New York: New Directions Books, 2015), 62.

2 Stephen Paul Martin, cited in Poetry Foundation, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/ susan-howe.

3 Howe, The Quarry, 31.

4 Claude Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” The Bell System Technical Journal 27 (1949): 379-423, 623-656.

5 Kasimir Malevich, The Non-Objective World: The Manifesto of Suprematism (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2003 reprint), 76.

6 Malevich, The Non-Objective World, 76.

7 Howe, The Quarry, 3.

–

Laura August is a writer and curator working between Houston and Guatemala City. Her writing has been published in ArtForum, Art Lies, Artishock, Art Review, Arts + Culture Texas, Gulf Coast, and Pastelegram, among other international magazines, exhibition catalogs, and artist monographs. She holds a PhD in Art History and is a recipient of The Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her writing about art in Central America. She was a Core Critical Studies Fellow at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston from 2016-2018. In 2018, she co-curated Guatemala’s Paiz Biennial.

Andrés Ramírez Gaviria’s creates art that is full of time. Time holds sway over his works, and it is the essence of its development. The artist used his time at soart artists-in-residence in September 2018 to reflect further on this concept and while reading Carlo Rovelli’s book The Order of Time, to contemplate this question: “Is time something real or really just a useful measurement of change?” Ramírez Gaviria joins the Italian physicist Rovelli in expressing a desire to find an explanation for how time can be perceived and sometimes even physically experienced.

In History’s Carousel, a repetition and/or reenactment of Louis Misuraca’s trip to Italy, the artist uses a carousel slide projector to show 80 private pictures that nostalgically draw the gaze to that paradigm wherein time passes by most slowly, i.e., a vacation. Picturesque swaths of gently rolling coastline, mythological statues, ancient busts, and family portraits set before boulevards lined with pine trees elicit sentimental feelings to which even the Mad Men character, Don Draper, could not be immune when describing the slide carousel projector as the ultimate time machine. It is precisely this technology, which Kodak brought to market in 1962, which was based on a design by Misuraca —who used the lump sum payment he received from Kodak for his invention to take a vacation with his family.

Ramírez Gaviria also used a similar payment to recreate and document Misuraca’s travels—albeit 60 years later and with his own family. In doing so, the artist formed a factual and fictional “circle” of experiences and memories that refer quite amusingly to the enjoyment he takes in reconfiguring history and stories. Ramírez Gaviria may have found the already autumnal backdrop of the Millstättersee to be quite an opportune, carousel-like reminder of the (Italian) events he experienced as he prepared for exhibitions in Costa Rica and Bogotá where this work was to be shown.

For Double, a series of found objects and their replicas or look-alikes that Ramírez Gaviria has been working on since 2014, the artist has thus far reproduced a glass bell jar, an aluminum frame, and a steel ring in such way that each is exact in terms of size and overall fashioning. Here, just as in History’s Carousel, Andrés Ramírez Gaviria is interested in those “tautological encounters” that reveal the world around us to be a construction and thereby he encourages us to question that which goes without saying.

Barbara Horvath  is an art historian, curator and cultural manager. After holding positions at MAK Vienna, Thyssen Bornemizsa Art Contemporary, Lehmann Maupin New York and KÖR Kunst im öffentlichen Raum Wien, among others, she has been artistic director and curator at Kunstverein Eisenstadt since 2020.

L’astronomia, nata come osservazione diretta del cielo a occhio nudo, ha fatto grandi progressi con l’invenzione del telescopio nel XVII secolo. La sua ideazione ha consentito di estendere la portata delle osservazioni, svelando l’esistenza di nuovi corpi celesti. Tuttavia, la luce visibile rappresenta solo una piccola parte dello spettro elettromagnetico e non consente di mostrare tutto ciò che compone l’Universo. Oggi la massa degli astri celesti costituisce soltanto il 5% della materia cosmica, la restante parte del volume risulta essere non visibile e viene definita materia oscura. Essa è lo scheletro dell’Universo, la rete che tiene assieme le galassie, i sistemi solari, i pianeti, le persone e gli oggetti. È un reticolo di filamenti che collega tutti i corpi celesti, non emette luce e non la assorbe.

Andrés Ramírez Gaviria è un artista concettuale colombiano che utilizza la tecnologia digitale come materiale d’analisi della verità nel contesto sociale, storico e artistico. La sua serie di opere Beyond Black (2010-) è costituita da pannelli in vetro nero contenenti una griglia impercettibile che può essere vista solamente tramite un microscopio a forza atomica, che agisce cioè su scala nanometrica. Le lastre in vetro non lasciano vedere l’interno dell’opera: sono assolute, totalmente nere, in piena tradizione maleviciana, dove il nero distruggeva la pittura tradizionale, per ottenere una profondità spaziale data dal vuoto di un supremo inizio e principio di un’espressione libera e pura della creazione umana. Ciò nonostante, l’artista dichiara la presenza di materia infinitesimale nell’indeterminatezza dell’oscurità, indecifrabile e invisibile che vive oltre il nero, generando dubbi negli spettatori e confondendone lo sguardo. Come in Empty Form (2008), Modal Patterns (2006) e in altre opere realizzate da Gaviria, Beyond Black evoca un mondo segreto che esiste in uno spazio liminale, di dubbio, tra l’idea e la sua manifestazione, tra la cosa in sé e il modo in cui può essere vista, cercando al contempo accettazione e convinzione nel fruitore. La superficie riflettente del vetro restituisce lo sguardo dubitante a sé stesso, annullando la ricerca intuitiva della materia che risulta essere impercettibile a occhio nudo. L’immaginazione viene spinta verso un’entità sensibile che sta oltre la superficie dell’opera e si manifesta in un’immersione dello spettatore nella ricerca della griglia che tuttavia rimane invisibile, lasciandolo libero di diverse interpretazioni personali e richiedendo un profondo atto di fede nella figura dell’artista. La rivelazione della presenza di qualcosa oltre la superficie avviene solamente per mano di Gaviria, che la esplicita nell’elenco dei materiali che compongono l’opera. Eppure, questo dettaglio enigmatico porta il fruitore a pensare che lo spazio nero dell’opera e il nero dell’universo siano qualcosa di reale che sta là dentro come la natura della realtà, il tessuto dell’universo, un oggetto da vedere e sentire, dentro a un colore. Il nero è inteso da Gaviria come uno spiraglio sull’enigma, un contenitore della profondità del mistero materico, un’oscurità fenomenica che riempie completamente l’essenza dell’umano. L’opera acquista così una portata ontologica più che estetica: diventa metafora di uno sguardo aperto sull’essere, un momento di attesa, di sospensione del tempo e dell’azione, del corpo e dello spazio.

Beyond Black accompagna lo spettatore nella profondità della materia oscura, di un mondo invisibile, al cui interno si sviluppano forme reali, geometriche e organiche, dove il colore nero trattiene tutta la materia e assume valenza gravitazionale. La griglia microscopica di Gaviria fa parte di un universo invisibile che sta al di là dei confini dell’esperienza sensibile, che raggiunge un altro livello di presenza, quello dell’assolutezza: il sostrato della verità, l’orizzonte dell’essere.

Giacomo Pigliapoco (Senigallia, 1991) è ricercatore e curatore indipendente di base a Milano. La sua pratica è focalizzata sul rapporto che sussiste tra tecnologia e società. In particolare approfondisce pratiche spiritico-tecnologiche e nuovi aspetti rituali, corporei e magici, che contrastano la velocità capitalistica della quotidianità. Tra le recenti mostre curate: Milano piano zero, Triennale – Milano; Crepuscolo, Bastione Sangallo – Loreto (An); Preferire l’ombra, Fondazione Sant’Elia – Palermo. Ha collaborato alla realizzazione di mostre e attività presso istituzioni italiane e internazionali come GAMeC – Bergamo; Kunsthalle Lissabon – Lisbona; Artissima – Torino; Collection Yvon Lambert – Avignone.

Sources

Andrés Ramírez Gaviria

Significativas novedades exigen pensar a profundidad en la fotografía, quizás de una manera tan intensa como sucedió en los comienzos de su historia. La naturalización de los usos fotográficos en los más variados espacios cotidianos, de conocimiento y de creación, sumada a la sofisticación y a la facilitación de las herramientas fotográficas ha opacado y descuidado la necesaria reflexión sobre los alcances y las limitaciones representativas del medio.  Pero el estado de caos y desconcierto colectivo al que ha llevado la proliferación de falsas y resonantes enunciaciones -estructuradas en un número importante de casos a partir de recursos fotográficos- urge a la revisión filosófica de los mecanismos que permiten armar las distorsiones o las falacias. Esto implica una lectura atenta y continua a lo que acontece en el campo creativo.

Es en el territorio del arte en donde despiertan comprensiones integrales y abarcadoras cuya complejidad implica desarrollos extendidos en el tiempo. El arte c