Texts made for the catalog of the exhibitions CUMULUS - GREACE IMPREGNATION ON PAPER in the gallery 704 art office in the city of Buenos Aires in 2016 and in Seismic Space in the city of Buenos Aires in 2018.
Text by Patricio Diego Suárez
THE INDISCERNIBLE AS A PREMISE
In Lucas Pisano's work there is an insistence and a position taking linked to the materials. As if the materials, far from being inert, gave the virtual information necessary to organize tensions and build a concept around the image. The exercise of an intelligence that is articulated between acting body and matter, magmatic zone from which the indications of a language arise. Compositional strategy that brings us closer to the Baconian idea of accident : that singular event that breaks into the creative process and generates a kind of involuntary precision at the image level that from the subjective will would be impossible to achieve.
In the case of Pisano, the accidental became, with the years of activity, a working premise. Compose without a preliminary sketch, understand that the time stamps of the work have to be preserved, follow only vectors. Aggregation, sweeping, cleaning procedures: generate a body-mass and then crush it, cut it, attack it. Move the body-matter that tends to the image, make incisions, until it is almost completely erased to reach the gesture, the trace. And that the footprint remains as evidence of a temporary process on an unpredictable game of variations. The relationship between desire, pictorial imagery and matter. Paraphrasing Lamborghini : patience, ass and error.
STAIN AND FIGURE
Cumulus clouds obsessively probes the boundary between the stain and the figurative. The figurative illusion is conquered but from a precariousness of the image that is a direct result of the material itself: the fat with its diffuse limits retains a suggestive ambiguity and associative resonances that are not closed in a totalizing sense. The eye is caught by a pendulum movement, a wave vibration that travels bouncing between a stable territory of optical illusion to an indiscernible zone of representative dissolution.
The elements that serve as a framework for action are some basic ideas of structure: the support of the paper affected by the grease patina, the scratched background, the texture of the paper, fabric or wood. A plane of consistency, a ring, as a condition of possibility of that line of action to be discovered. Then the meticulous work with matter, of action and reaction, attack and defense. A microscopic mining from which the gesture emerges as an open sign, indiscernible information that exceeds the optical organization of the image, and provokes a game of resonances between the recognizable and the unrecognizable: a body-figure that on its borders seems defined, but that inside is a multitude.
Pisano goes straight to the forces: it is in the folds of the paper texture that the physical twisting of the body appears. There is no representative humanization of paper, cloth or wood, it is in the violence of the breaks that organic writhing appears, the intestinal movement, due to the same weight of the material that resists its flattening. And it is also in the irregularities of the texture of the cloth or the paper where the figurative indication of the human body appears: a body-cloth, a body-paper, a body-image. In summary, the development of a pictorial operation that manages to sustain two or more levels of sensitive and visual reading in a simultaneous movement.
In other words, what happens at the concrete level of matter with its resistances, is preserved at the formal level of the image. At the same moment that we are spectators of a wooden mountain, the pupil takes a sudden turn for approach and the image recovers the literalness of the matter, reveals the artifice, the planes become independent of the composition, the fat imposes itself to smear the cancha.Gracias this procedure the activity of the eye expands, the narrative construction work is like an image viewer that despite ostensible figurative possess traits, not consolidated or closed image. That zone of indiscernibility is the hook that the image tends to activate historical discourses, of moral or class sensitivity in the viewer: beggars, garbage dumps, poverty and precariousness. However, this narrative field is still an associative recreation of the observer. All we have in sight are only clues at the border of the figurative and the non-figurative.
ÍCON AND DROP
There is a clear decision to preserve this ambiguity that goes beyond the particular resistance of fat and enters a conceptual level that directly discusses with the voracious, fast and apathetic mode from which we are linked with images today. Or on the contrary, the subjective mechanisms promoted by social networks and the logic of visibility, where the image of ourselves is postulated as the only index of existence.
In the case of Lucas Pisano, the conscious work on the indiscernible and his picaresque gesture of leading him to the place of the iconic, can be read as a taking of a position against this problem. What questions does the cluster that is always in the center of the compositions radiate, establishing a kind of target shooting, is it here ? That pile of organized matter becomes an icon, but in the place where we are accustomed to reading the net referentiality of the product, we come across an area of figurative collapse. A landscape of waste and landfill does not open, there is a pictorial synthesis that makes waste a baroque icon, a bubbling totem, a decomposing religious symbol.
The iconic character also derives from the photographic aesthetics of the series, fostered by black and white and the treatment of depth. Without straining the imagination too much, they could be post-war stock photos or some non-existent civilization. However, the photographic does not arise from a polished image where the pictorial gesture disappears, but on the contrary, it is made up of the depth generated by the palimpsest of planes that preserve the accumulation of matter. Another wink. What makes the work photographic is not the illustrative perfection procedure, but the imaginary of the photographic culture, the visual education of photography that works as a lens through which the viewer faces the painting.
We could intuit in this work the overflight of a historical impression of catastrophe, the evidence of an overproduction towards nothingness and ruin as an aesthetic discovery. Cumulus leads the waste to the level of the auric, presents what supposedly has no place as the focus of space or scene. Pile of dirt that becomes center of gravity and acquires the character of an advertising effigy. On the podium of the consumable object we are spectators of an indiscernible cluster that expels its demolition, contamination and precarious aesthetics. And this, what do you eat with?
THE INDISCERNIBLE AS A PREMISE
In Lucas Pisano's work there is an insistence and a position taking linked to the materials. As if the materials, far from being inert, gave the virtual information necessary to organize tensions and build a concept around the image. The exercise of an intelligence that is articulated between acting body and matter, magmatic zone from which the indications of a language arise. Compositional strategy that brings us closer to the Baconian idea of accident : that singular event that breaks into the creative process and generates a kind of involuntary precision at the image level that from the subjective will would be impossible to achieve.
In the case of Pisano, the accidental became, with the years of activity, a working premise. Compose without a preliminary sketch, understand that the time stamps of the work have to be preserved, follow only vectors. Aggregation, sweeping, cleaning procedures: generate a body-mass and then crush it, cut it, attack it. Move the body-matter that tends to the image, make incisions, until it is almost completely erased to reach the gesture, the trace. And that the footprint remains as evidence of a temporary process on an unpredictable game of variations. The relationship between desire, pictorial imagery and matter. Paraphrasing Lamborghini : patience, ass and error.
STAIN AND FIGURE
Cumulus clouds obsessively probes the boundary between the stain and the figurative. The figurative illusion is conquered but from a precariousness of the image that is a direct result of the material itself: the fat with its diffuse limits retains a suggestive ambiguity and associative resonances that are not closed in a totalizing sense. The eye is caught by a pendulum movement, a wave vibration that travels bouncing between a stable territory of optical illusion to an indiscernible zone of representative dissolution.
The elements that serve as a framework for action are some basic ideas of structure: the support of the paper affected by the grease patina, the scratched background, the texture of the paper, fabric or wood. A plane of consistency, a ring, as a condition of possibility of that line of action to be discovered. Then the meticulous work with matter, of action and reaction, attack and defense. A microscopic mining from which the gesture emerges as an open sign, indiscernible information that exceeds the optical organization of the image, and provokes a game of resonances between the recognizable and the unrecognizable: a body-figure that on its borders seems defined, but that inside is a multitude.
Pisano goes straight to the forces: it is in the folds of the paper texture that the physical twisting of the body appears. There is no representative humanization of paper, cloth or wood, it is in the violence of the breaks that organic writhing appears, the intestinal movement, due to the same weight of the material that resists its flattening. And it is also in the irregularities of the texture of the cloth or the paper where the figurative indication of the human body appears: a body-cloth, a body-paper, a body-image. In summary, the development of a pictorial operation that manages to sustain two or more levels of sensitive and visual reading in a simultaneous movement.
In other words, what happens at the concrete level of matter with its resistances, is preserved at the formal level of the image. At the same moment that we are spectators of a wooden mountain, the pupil takes a sudden turn for approach and the image recovers the literalness of the matter, reveals the artifice, the planes become independent of the composition, the fat imposes itself to smear the cancha.Gracias this procedure the activity of the eye expands, the narrative construction work is like an image viewer that despite ostensible figurative possess traits, not consolidated or closed image. That zone of indiscernibility is the hook that the image tends to activate historical discourses, of moral or class sensitivity in the viewer: beggars, garbage dumps, poverty and precariousness. However, this narrative field is still an associative recreation of the observer. All we have in sight are only clues at the border of the figurative and the non-figurative.
ÍCON AND DROP
There is a clear decision to preserve this ambiguity that goes beyond the particular resistance of fat and enters a conceptual level that directly discusses with the voracious, fast and apathetic mode from which we are linked with images today. Or on the contrary, the subjective mechanisms promoted by social networks and the logic of visibility, where the image of ourselves is postulated as the only index of existence.
In the case of Lucas Pisano, the conscious work on the indiscernible and his picaresque gesture of leading him to the place of the iconic, can be read as a taking of a position against this problem. What questions does the cluster that is always in the center of the compositions radiate, establishing a kind of target shooting, is it here ? That pile of organized matter becomes an icon, but in the place where we are accustomed to reading the net referentiality of the product, we come across an area of figurative collapse. A landscape of waste and landfill does not open, there is a pictorial synthesis that makes waste a baroque icon, a bubbling totem, a decomposing religious symbol.
The iconic character also derives from the photographic aesthetics of the series, fostered by black and white and the treatment of depth. Without straining the imagination too much, they could be post-war stock photos or some non-existent civilization. However, the photographic does not arise from a polished image where the pictorial gesture disappears, but on the contrary, it is made up of the depth generated by the palimpsest of planes that preserve the accumulation of matter. Another wink. What makes the work photographic is not the illustrative perfection procedure, but the imaginary of the photographic culture, the visual education of photography that works as a lens through which the viewer faces the painting.
We could intuit in this work the overflight of a historical impression of catastrophe, the evidence of an overproduction towards nothingness and ruin as an aesthetic discovery. Cumulus leads the waste to the level of the auric, presents what supposedly has no place as the focus of space or scene. Pile of dirt that becomes center of gravity and acquires the character of an advertising effigy. On the podium of the consumable object we are spectators of an indiscernible cluster that expels its demolition, contamination and precarious aesthetics. And this, what do you eat with?
Text by Sol Fantin
The disturbing power of the material
In the series of works that make up the Cumulus work , there is a subtle sense of humor. Black humor, of course. There where one, as a spectator, thinks she is sure of what she is seeing, there is a gap , a mistake, an error, which reveals to what extent the gaze projects what it decides to project onto a material surface (even if it is decided without realizing it ).
Each of the pieces in the series shows an accumulation of discarded materials, of garbage, an accumulation of waste in the shape of a pyramid, in the center of a scene that does not refer to anything outside of itself: it is the non-space from which products are displayed for consumption. In several of these works, in the accumulation of garbage (wood or cloth or newsprint) the crouched, twisted, convoluted form of a body is glimpsed. Living body or corpse? Impossible to know, but without a doubt: discard body, like the discard material that covers it.
Obscene vision (literally: what should be out of the picture ) that is nevertheless exhibited in any corner of a big city: the human body reduced to waste. But the body itself is not seen. Are you naked? Are you masturbating? Is crying? Are you dying? Are you laughing? Not known. When I walk down the street and see that pile of garbage that nevertheless hides a body similar to mine, I look away: out of modesty, out of fear, out of impotence, out of habit. Cumulus forces the gaze to be directed directly towards that point of darkness, towards the forcefulness of the thing that is there, and that perhaps is not just a thing. But in the case of Cumulus , it is an image, there is nobody there: we can look without the risk of being questioned by the living. Without feeling guilty for what we could and are not doing, without the weight of the decision to be indifferent or not. We can look like a voyeur , who perhaps looks like looking for himself in a mirror.
The impact is largely due to the photographic appearance of the works. Photography is a plastic genre that abuses plausibility, the desire for mimesis, the phantasmagoria of the impossible presence of what is represented. That myth that the good savages ( Roussonian speaking) feared that their souls would be stolen when photographed only reveals our archaic terror of ghosts. To those who return from somewhere beyond to claim their due. So the tremendous unease at what seems like the photograph of a body buried under newspapers or dirty fabrics. That body and I are not sharing the world now, but we could have shared it. That body buried in trash was real .
Cumulus recalls photography from the forties, or even earlier. The first documentary records of the human in its most abject dimension: the piles of corpses from the death camps, for example. The human body reduced to material that accumulates. What you see in Cumulus is, ironically, the reverse of the consumer product: the waste that should be on the sidelines, but enthroned at the center of the scene. Does the museum device or the art institution make this image a new consumer product, reintroducing it to the market through a kind of cruelty aesthetic? The viewer is questioned by this question and corroded by its resonances, all uncomfortable.
And yet, the aesthetic experience is in its preliminaries. The engines are hot, now we are ready for what follows: warn and accept that there is no photograph. There is not even drawing or painting in the traditional sense. The design of the trash heap that shows through a body is an effect produced by the distribution of industrial greases on a porous surface. A material that does not belong to the repertoire of artistically consecrated materials, manipulated by means of combs and other objects, has produced the visual effect of what I thought I saw, that bothered me to see, that I accepted as a thing there , without realizing that it was I who did it. projected.
Fat makes you fat: your visibility in a body makes you precisely obscene, in the sense that you are exiled to the territory of the taboo, from what should not be seen. A good body has no visible fat. Fat messes, smears, ruins. And yet it is necessary. Fat is a material from the world of work, not from the world of leisure. Fat is not fine, it is not pretty, it is not comme-il-faut . The fat is thick , it is suburban, it is the one that greases Carlos de la Púa's crest, because beware: the poetics of fat has its high tradition. Lucas Pisano is a great reader of Perlongher (I know, I saw his copy of complete works worn out by so much reading): the fat is like the mud of the neo- mud , and a fat that suggests a corpse is a fat that is saying that there are corpses .
There is no photo, there is no drawing, there is no limpid support on which a line tries to reproduce an image of reality. There is a layer of grease manipulated with combs on a porous surface, and there is an image in my spectator brain that is projected there and that sees what it is used to seeing, perhaps what in the background you want to see, because the prohibition of looking at Facing the abject generates that culpogenic desire that the phantom projects: that body that has become trash, the reverse of the object of consumption, which I may well be myself. I may well be myself, what a mess.
So a lot of grease staining a rough paper is a mirror. Here is the black humor, and here is the critical power of Cumulus , at the point where I, the spectator, ask myself, closing a circle (one turn of the spiral): Are not all the mirror images where I project my terrors, my favorite masks, the reverse of my conscience or their totems? The advertising image, the journalistic image, the public intimacy of my photos on the social network, the documentary image and the artistic image, all those images, all confused in a common space increasingly governed by the logic of the show, are they not perhaps produced by my own gaze, which feeds on them but also creates them, in a symbiosis that can only be exited through a question? And what is that question?
The pretense of omnipresence of images in our contemporary urban lives, together with its great sophistication, should not lead us to believe that the nature of images is no longer problematic. Perhaps it is more than ever. Ontologically, the question would be what kind of being among beings is an image: what is my profile picture, what is the public image of a ruler, what do I see from the newscast on television; And epistemologically, the question would be what kind of information can I extract from the image, and how much of that information do I provide myself, is in my own gaze and (as we said before) mirrors me.
I believe that one of the merits of Cumulus is to forcefully install this disturbance inherent in images. In a cultural context eager to rush towards an increasingly savage disembodiment , Cumulus is an annoying work. The horrendous image is halfway between the material surface of the work and my own gaze. It is between the bodies, like a spectrum that runs through the world while everything rots. Or while everything rots.
Text by Sol Fantin
The disturbing power of the material
In the series of works that make up the Cumulus work , there is a subtle sense of humor. Black humor, of course. There where one, as a spectator, thinks she is sure of what she is seeing, there is a gap , a mistake, an error, which reveals to what extent the gaze projects what it decides to project onto a material surface (even if it is decided without realizing it ).
Each of the pieces in the series shows an accumulation of discarded materials, of garbage, an accumulation of waste in the shape of a pyramid, in the center of a scene that does not refer to anything outside of itself: it is the non-space from which products are displayed for consumption. In several of these works, in the accumulation of garbage (wood or cloth or newsprint) the crouched, twisted, convoluted form of a body is glimpsed. Living body or corpse? Impossible to know, but without a doubt: discard body, like the discard material that covers it.
Obscene vision (literally: what should be out of the picture ) that is nevertheless exhibited in any corner of a big city: the human body reduced to waste. But the body itself is not seen. Are you naked? Are you masturbating? Is crying? Are you dying? Are you laughing? Not known. When I walk down the street and see that pile of garbage that nevertheless hides a body similar to mine, I look away: out of modesty, out of fear, out of impotence, out of habit. Cumulus forces the gaze to be directed directly towards that point of darkness, towards the forcefulness of the thing that is there, and that perhaps is not just a thing. But in the case of Cumulus , it is an image, there is nobody there: we can look without the risk of being questioned by the living. Without feeling guilty for what we could and are not doing, without the weight of the decision to be indifferent or not. We can look like a voyeur , who perhaps looks like looking for himself in a mirror.
The impact is largely due to the photographic appearance of the works. Photography is a plastic genre that abuses plausibility, the desire for mimesis, the phantasmagoria of the impossible presence of what is represented. That myth that the good savages ( Roussonian speaking) feared that their souls would be stolen when photographed only reveals our archaic terror of ghosts. To those who return from somewhere beyond to claim their due. So the tremendous unease at what seems like the photograph of a body buried under newspapers or dirty fabrics. That body and I are not sharing the world now, but we could have shared it. That body buried in trash was real .
Cumulus recalls photography from the forties, or even earlier. The first documentary records of the human in its most abject dimension: the piles of corpses from the death camps, for example. The human body reduced to material that accumulates. What you see in Cumulus is, ironically, the reverse of the consumer product: the waste that should be on the sidelines, but enthroned at the center of the scene. Does the museum device or the art institution make this image a new consumer product, reintroducing it to the market through a kind of cruelty aesthetic? The viewer is questioned by this question and corroded by its resonances, all uncomfortable.
And yet, the aesthetic experience is in its preliminaries. The engines are hot, now we are ready for what follows: warn and accept that there is no photograph. There is not even drawing or painting in the traditional sense. The design of the trash heap that shows through a body is an effect produced by the distribution of industrial greases on a porous surface. A material that does not belong to the repertoire of artistically consecrated materials, manipulated by means of combs and other objects, has produced the visual effect of what I thought I saw, that bothered me to see, that I accepted as a thing there , without realizing that it was I who did it. projected.
Fat makes you fat: your visibility in a body makes you precisely obscene, in the sense that you are exiled to the territory of the taboo, from what should not be seen. A good body has no visible fat. Fat messes, smears, ruins. And yet it is necessary. Fat is a material from the world of work, not from the world of leisure. Fat is not fine, it is not pretty, it is not comme-il-faut . The fat is thick , it is suburban, it is the one that greases Carlos de la Púa's crest, because beware: the poetics of fat has its high tradition. Lucas Pisano is a great reader of Perlongher (I know, I saw his copy of complete works worn out by so much reading): the fat is like the mud of the neo- mud , and a fat that suggests a corpse is a fat that is saying that there are corpses .
There is no photo, there is no drawing, there is no limpid support on which a line tries to reproduce an image of reality. There is a layer of grease manipulated with combs on a porous surface, and there is an image in my spectator brain that is projected there and that sees what it is used to seeing, perhaps what in the background you want to see, because the prohibition of looking at Facing the abject generates that culpogenic desire that the phantom projects: that body that has become trash, the reverse of the object of consumption, which I may well be myself. I may well be myself, what a mess.
So a lot of grease staining a rough paper is a mirror. Here is the black humor, and here is the critical power of Cumulus , at the point where I, the spectator, ask myself, closing a circle (one turn of the spiral): Are not all the mirror images where I project my terrors, my favorite masks, the reverse of my conscience or their totems? The advertising image, the journalistic image, the public intimacy of my photos on the social network, the documentary image and the artistic image, all those images, all confused in a common space increasingly governed by the logic of the show, are they not perhaps produced by my own gaze, which feeds on them but also creates them, in a symbiosis that can only be exited through a question? And what is that question?
The pretense of omnipresence of images in our contemporary urban lives, together with its great sophistication, should not lead us to believe that the nature of images is no longer problematic. Perhaps it is more than ever. Ontologically, the question would be what kind of being among beings is an image: what is my profile picture, what is the public image of a ruler, what do I see from the newscast on television; And epistemologically, the question would be what kind of information can I extract from the image, and how much of that information do I provide myself, is in my own gaze and (as we said before) mirrors me.
I believe that one of the merits of Cumulus is to forcefully install this disturbance inherent in images. In a cultural context eager to rush towards an increasingly savage disembodiment , Cumulus is an annoying work. The horrendous image is halfway between the material surface of the work and my own gaze. It is between the bodies, like a spectrum that runs through the world while everything rots. Or while everything rots.