Some Words
"The more exquisite the thing seen, the more exquisite the thing unseen."
Wallace Stevens
In 1917, the poet Fernando Pessoa stated, through the mouth of Antonio Mora, one of his heteronyms, that "The gods are human ideas in passage from concrete notions toward abstract ideas." Almost a century later, Luis Vassallo initiates a series of drawings that refer to works from the history of painting with which he maintains a special affective relationship, and which feature different characters from Greek mythology as central figures. Pessoa's affirmation resonates, as an involuntary echo, in the origin of an exhibition that brings together deities, schools, transits and ideas in a highly personal inquiry.
Because, although the germ of "Mitemas" lies in these first sketches, the works that compose the exhibition soon overflow their subject matter, to weave a broader reflection on the functioning of the conduits that communicate the pools of figuration and abstraction. In the course of this analysis, the artist reminds us of the importance that the ability to give form to the figure of the gods had for pictorial practice, thus reducing the distance between concrete notions and abstract realities. He also points out that painting was, to a large extent, responsible for snatching this form from divinity when its attention shifted toward the essence of the unseen thing.
Following the thread of this argument, Vassallo establishes a peculiar genealogy of vision that departs from Baroque painting, and its fertile disposition of bodies in an organic space, to connect it with Constructivism, Suprematism or with North American post-conceptual painting of the early eighties, where the figure seems to disappear into the color field. Such a sequence has something of a stress test in which the artist defends his right to play with diverse materials, reformulate the relationship between them and create new lines of work in which both analysis and free creation weigh equally. In the journey proposed by Vassallo, we see titans and gods transit from the agonistic corporeality of their motif toward the unknown land of abstraction. Thus, Tityus and Sisyphus rise as hybrid automatons, in a revision that converts Titian's Furies into black paintings with geometric hearts. Before our eyes, Poussin's Orion mutates successively into a Saint Christopher, armed with his staff; into a Constructivist peasant, into a heap of blocks and, finally, into stains, hieroglyphics... barely anything. Perhaps, where the beginning of this metamorphosis can best be appreciated is in the great reformulation of The Forge of Vulcan, a work with which Vassallo maintains a special affective relationship and which constitutes the starting point of the conceptual journey posed in "Mitemas." In it, the scenography is reduced to its most basic framework and only remains, as a central focus, an Epiphany of Apollo that is little less than a luminescence of primary yellow... Throughout the exhibition, we witness how the figures and themes give way to regular areas of flat colors that evoke books yet to be written. Blank canvases or immutable architectures that refer us to Chris Martin's Three Black Paintings; subatomic spaces with the capacity to simultaneously contain and deny all possible figures in the universe.
"Myths, body and abstraction, a new figuration, historical fictions, time and form, the divine and the human, drama, humor, an American gaze, figures in space, paintings in a room..." As Luis Vassallo points out, "Mitemas" pulls on many threads and invites the viewer to pull on as many others. Only upon pulling the last strand will we realize the multiple and paradoxical results offered by a mechanism as sophisticated as the pictorial.
Thus, the more exquisite the thing seen, the more it reveals the naked idea that animates it. And, conversely, the more impenetrable the representation of an idea, the more it seems to long for the reverie of the figure that yearns to be seen. It happens in that Great Aleph, central part of the exhibition, which mutates—absorbed in its total analytical purity—from Atlas Mnemosyne, to theater of memory, Library of Babel or total museum where it could be said that the paintings, reduced to primary colors, want to illuminate, anew, the supreme fiction that nests in the transit between abstractions and concrete notions.
David Morán Álvarez