FILIPA RAMOS


Absence
Clearly Invisible, the name of an exhibition presented in the shape of an (invisible) Archive, is taken from a sentence by the American artist Michael Asher, who deeply dealt with the questions ob absence and invisibility in his work.

Another reference to this show is ‘Species of Spaces and other Pieces’ (1974), a book by the French writer and film director Georges Perec, which starts like this: The subject of this book is not the void exactly, but rather what there is round about or inside it. To star with, then, there isn’t very much: nothingness, the impalpable, the virtually immaterial; extension, the external, what is external to us, what we move about in the midst of, our ambient milieu, the space around us. These words could be used to describe the attempt made in the creation of this show.

Therefore, Clearly Invisible takes absence, lack of image and frustration as it starting point.

The exhibition is about the production of an archive that doesn’t exist, for most of its contents are invisible, inexistent or they have took failure as their inspiration. It intends to be a reflection about how emptiness, void and incompleteness have an infinite potential in artistic creation.

Thus, Clearly Invisible is the most extended visual possibility of seeing something that can’t or that shouldn’t be seen. The artists who were invited to present their works treat the questions raised by the exhibition in different ways.

Both Mario Garcia Torres’ (Monclova, Mexico, 1975) A Never-to-be-seen-by-the-patron Artwork (2004) and Alexandre Estrela’s (Lisbon, 1971) The Dark Stands Still (2000) explore impossibility of seeing in a different approach. Garcia Torres creates an artwork that should never be seen by its patron, or it will loose its authenticity, perverting the usual fruition of the work, especially by the person who got it. On the other side, Estrela hinders a camcorder from capturing images, perverting its use and function and reducing it to a mere object that, standing vertically on its lense and being captured by another video camera, functions as an almost useless action.

Also Mario Garcia Torres’ documentation of the work The Halifax Files (Formely known as Who Killed Robert’s Secret?) (2005) show a research the artist did regarding a secret piece that Robert Barry submitted to the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design’s Project Class in 1969. It involves the original students that participated in such piece and their views as seen from today. It recovers an invisible work and it analyses the way private and collective memory work in time.

Emptiness
Clearly Invisible analyses how absence can be a productive subject (and object) in the artistic process and how the lack of something can interfere in the way in which a work of art is perceived. It is not an exhibition about invisibility in itself but a reflection about the results produced by the lack of visibility. This “condition of absence” is an extremely productive concept and can generate an enormous freedom from the weight of the visual in art.

Dora Garcia’s (Valladolid, 1965) Locked Room is an ongoing project that explores this narrow line between invisibility and emptiness. By creating a locked room where nobody but her can enter, the Spanish artist subtracts an area from the museum that becomes a mental space, for it is impossible to have access to it outside imagination. All the physical relations with it are totally broken and that space remains forever unreachable and unseen, even if still perceived. Garcia is also exhibiting Forever (2004-ongoing). Forever is a permanent work at Frac Lorraine, where the artist installed a webcamera in one of the exhibition rooms, allowing her to observe what is going on in that space. This workis a reflection about eternity, exploring the possibilities of relationship with a public space through absence and invisibility: Garcia is never there but she can see it constantly. A copy of the contract the artist made with Frac is available in the exhibition.

Sabine Delafon (Grenoble, 1975) has produced a series of works in which she reflects about both her condition as an artist and about her own presence inside spaces. Sabine Delafon (2006), is a series of t-shirts she exhibits as a documentation of a performance she organized in Miart Art Fair in Milan, 2006, where there were people walking around the art fair with her name on it. The artist wasn’t present, which accentuated the idea of disappearance and non-correspondence between a text, a name and a person. However, Miart happened to be the wrong place to do that work that, suddenly, became totally invisible. This work is connected to another of her works, I’m Looking for Myself, a series of public adds she displayed in the street, trying to find someone who could be similar (in different ways) to her.


Void
Clearly Invisible is a research-oriented project that has a very strong documental weight, therefore most of the works exhibited, together with the books, texts and other materials, are part of the same concept of creating a selective and subjective archive that intends to research invisibility as an artistic practice. The project, baring in mind its intention to produce an archive, will give priority to all the processes behind the creation of artwork, in a sense, to the pre-production of invisibility. Davide Minuti (Turin, 1973) is showing In Between (you and me sometimes) (2007), in which he uses unsent letters and messages to establish impossible strategies of communication that oscillate between his memories and our thoughts, passing from past to future through the present conditions in which they are exposed to public knowledge. This work is part of a bigger installation from which everything was removed and all that is left to be seen is the immateriality of his own words.

Jonathan Monk (Leicester, 1969) reflects about reproduction and loss in his Today is Just a Copy of Yesterday (Lisson/LeWitt) (2003). An image of a wall-piece by Sol LeWitt at London’s Lisson Gallery for the exhibition the conceptual artist did in 1972 has been used to create a series of 80 slides of increasingly poor quality, doping each one of them from the precedent until the image is totally lost an unrecognizable.

Ignasi Aballi’s (Barcelona, 1958) video Próxima Apariciòn (2005) explores anticipation and suspension while referring to cinema culture to endlessly announce something that never gets to happen. Also his documentation of Desapariciones (2002), 24 posters of films that the French filmmaker Georges Perec never made, move in an gap that the artist managed to create through the visual announces of something it will never happen; fiction, really and expectation get confused in an impossible promise.

There is a clear conceptual interest and background that rules the logic of the exhibition and its criteria. Some of the artists, like Aballi, Brüggemann, Garcia, Garcia Torres or Monk reveal a clear conceptual or post-conceptual approach in their work. However, the show intends to go further than a simple analysis of contemporary conceptual practices in art, analysing invisibility as a raw material for imagination.

Invisibility, absence and nothingness are concepts that extend the limits of artistic creation to an endless array of possibilities, giving space and freedom to imagination, and that is what this exhibition is all about: developing an archive of unruled and uncontrolled possibilities of conceiving and perceiving both art and exhibitions.

According to Mel Bochner, The root word “image” need not to be used only to mean representation (in the sense of one thing referring to something other than itsef). To re-present can be defined as the shift in referential frames of the viewer from the space of events to the space of statements or vice-versa. Imagining (as opposed to imaging) is not a pictorial preoccupation. Imagination is a projection, the exteriorizing of ideas about the nature of things seen. It re-produces that which is initially without product. (1970).