Carlos Delgado. The Doors of Uaset I. Madrid. 2014
Texto catálogo “Las puertas de Uaset”. Tabacalera, Promoción del Arte. Madrid, Diciembre 2014
LAS PUERTAS DE UASET
Carlos Delgado Mayordomo
TERRITORIES
These pages intend to address the formal language of José Manuel Ciria, an artist whose career has developed around an investigation of the painterly image as a territory whose cartography can still be rewritten. To that end, it has always taken as its point of departure the successes and failures of the modernist movements that structured the evolution of modern art and distilled that legacy (now poisoned, now revelatory) as a structure upon which to support his own aesthetic and conceptual foundations. These foundations were developed through experimentation because his studio is, in essence, a laboratory where he creates formal artifacts that are surprisingly integrated into the course of the artistic panorama of his time. We will attempt to clear up in the following guide what kind of artifacts they are and the way in which they have produced, as a whole, one of the most complex poetic visions in contemporary Spanish painting.
The progressive reconfiguration of Ciria’s work shows, first, a continuing eagerness to develop a coherent defense of the permanence and relevance of the medium of painting that goes beyond fashions, disparagement or death knells. His attitude on many occasions has entailed going against the stream to affirm painting, its boundaries blurred by the paralyzing weight of postmodern theory, and underline the potential of this discipline to constantly cross into new theoretical and formal territories. But above all, Ciria has sought to construct a kind of painting that prevails over the trivialization of the image in this era of digitalized perception and thus manage to destabilize the ever increasing passivity of the viewer before the formal image.
Madrid
Born in Manchester in 1960, Ciria began an educational process in Madrid during the ’70s which combined academic training with a personal exploration of the criteria of the historical avant-garde. He started to establish more rigorous criteria for his painting in the early ’80s, now structured into series and, from a formal perspective, directly connected to the figurative neo-expressionism which prevailed as the favored international trend of that era. However, Ciria soon distanced himself from a formal vocabulary directed by fashions and searched for different options to pursue to create his own discourse in the early ’90s. The diversity in Ciria’s formal expression at this point in his production was analyzed as a profound crisis of his images[1] in the period prior to defining an initial resolution oriented towards abstraction.
Some of the paintings that made up the “Hombres, Manos, Formas Orgánicas y Signos” series («Men, Hands, Organic Forms and Signs», 1989-90) can be considered the start of a journey that was soon complemented by a theoretical platform he began to formulate in a notebook. Through the written expression of his thinking, he tried to clarify the mechanics of painting by analyzing it as a language, an experiment with quite specific goals as the artist indicated throughout its pages:
To legitimize the practice of painting through an experimental and investigative approach, and trying to establish meanings / To make the actions involved in the practice of painting objective through theoretical reflection (theory connected to experimentation) / To observe the changes in meaning produced by formulating a series of descriptive units / To take an interest in understanding the mechanics of expression specific to painting.[2]
That Ciria started his list with the intention of legitimizing the practice of painting was no accident. In fact, this interest was the initial force that inspired the artist to undertake a deep theoretical investigation, a construction which quickly confirmed the coherence and seriousness of his future production. The notebook in and of itself became what he needed, a foundation that would sustain him against the possibility of falling into the void. Creating it established an accurate analysis of the components and possibilities that were beginning to stabilize in his new painting discourse.
Through this notebook of notes, Cira reflected extensively on the main theoretical-experimental questions of his investigation, namely: compartmentalization, the techniques of controlled chance, pictorial levels and iconographic research. These four concepts, together with the multiple possibilities for interaction they offered among themselves (which the artist named «combinatory»), constituted the conceptual base that would shape the later production of the artist. Now, to go over the route he followed after the discovery of his own way of understanding the abstract image is to venture into an area with paths that branch off in different directions only to reappear later. After the liberation from meaning his arrival at abstraction entailed, Ciria structured the analytical areas of his formal process into groups and subgroups, anticipating a high number of entry points. He also created transversal explorations like the idea of the ephemeral («Mnemosyne» series, 1994) and its effects on the memory; a direct dialog with the classical tradition («El Tiempo Detenido / Time Detained» series, 1996); reconsidered the visual codes of the landscape genre («Monfragüe» series, 2000); but above all, his work maintained a steady focus on the relation between the geometrical arrangement versus the irregular eruption of the stain.
Up until the Gesto y Orden («Gesture and Order», 1994) exhibition in the Palacio de Velázquez in Madrid, the geometry was being superimposed over the gestural stains. Those new pieces were the culmination of an initial investigation where the symbolic emptying of the image was opening the path towards a progressive liberalization of the gesture. With the “Máscaras de la Mirada” («Masks of the Glance») series, started that same year and one we will return to repeatedly throughout the text, the stains moved into the foreground and the linear grid became the background, always through resolutions suggested by the logic of the combinatory arrangement.
If this significant line of activity does not define the full range of interests in Ciria’s work, the major pieces in this period, the most innovative ones, were precisely those that took the dialectic possibilities of the stain and the geometry to the limit. In that sense, his «Máscaras de la Mirada» series could be defined as a central avenue that still continues to move forward today from the momentum created by constant experimentation. It also the marks the starting point for an artistic output answering to the urgency of a boundless imagination, the constant flow of ideas selected and organized around the parameters of A.D.A. (Automatic Deconstructive Abstraction), a name which, in the words of José Manuel Ciria himself:
Repeats in an absolutely subjective and capricious way the search for and reformulation of a series of antecedents inherited from Bretonian surrealism. To bring together in one technique and one sole gesture Ernst’s three-step method — abandonment, awareness and execution — does that possibility exist?[3]
The artist associated the process of deconstructing the image with the possibilities of automatism and posed his theoretical basis as a question that he himself is going to analyze affirmatively in his visual production. This tension, controlled by the fact that the oil, acid and water constituting the stain cannot be assimilated, and the multiple expressions it managed to impose on the geometry created varying levels of expressive intensity in the «Manifiesto» («Manifesto», 1998) and «Carmina Burana» (1998) series. And in the first years of the new century, the «Compartimentaciones» (“Compartmentalizations”, 1999-2000), «Cabezas de Rorschach I» (“Rorshach Heads I”, 2000), «Glosa Líquida» (“Liquid Words”, 2000-2003), “Dauphin Paintings” (2001), «Venus Geométrica» (“Geometric Venus”, 2002-2003), “Sueños Construidos» («Constructed Dreams”, 2000-2006) and «Horda Geométrica» (“Geometric Horde”, 2005) series completed various aspects of this investigation, until Ciria once again picked it up at the end of his New York period.
New York
We remarked at the beginning of this text that Ciria took the successes and failures of the modernist movements that structured the evolution of modern art as a point of departure for his poetic vision. In contrast to the gestures of the neo-avant-garde which turned into an institutionalized repetition under the pretext of its countless re-editions, Ciria has always sought to instrumentalize a way of working capable of avoiding the decorative and banal by posing a wide variety of questions about the current possibilities of painting. This search for a maturity not stifled by a domestication of his own style is what led him to move to New York in late 2005 to rethink the key elements to his discourse. It was a coherent strategy for an artist who always worked in a personal space in motion and honed a discourse which synergistically integrated the different contexts he inhabits.
As opposed to the idea of the migrant artist, either considered as an «other» working in a foreign territory or the cliche of the global traveler without ties to a specific territory, Ciria belongs to that group of creators who knew how to turn himself into a subject of action in the new space he accessed. Before his move to New York, Ciria was interested in that American avant-garde which understood painting as a place for an event, as Harold Rosenberg pointed out regarding the New York action painters. But now his physical presence in the city meant separating himself from the weight of that legacy and he committed to a cooling down of his painting, which translated into moderating the expressionist codes of his output during the ’90s. But above all, New York served as a space to reflect on and rethink his painting, to alter those values which he had developed in the previous decade with undeniable success. He was fully aware that it was a risky move: “I didn’t want to go back to painting more works in the vein of the gestural abstraction prior to New York”[4].
Ciria’s first steps towards a new language aimed at figurative exploration translated as the condensing of the free, expansive gestural stain within a visual structure defined by the line marking the edge. His earliest experiences in that vein formed the «Post-Supremática» (“Post Suprematist”, 2005) series, where the artist began to create faces with no identity, bodies without flesh, figures with frozen gestures and inexpressive appearances. From this point on, the logical evolution was going to be as much about continuity as rupture. Continuity because an exceptional tool for his subsequent works was discovered in these first pieces: the drawing as a compositional structure. Rupture because these first figures were adjusting to the degree where a territory of iconographic liberty became possible using forms that would soon cease to be controlled by the logic of the body.
This shift is the origin of what is undoubtedly one of the most prolific stages in Ciria’s career, marked by the expansive group of paintings making up the «La Guardia Place» (2006-2008) series. Families of varying referential intensity emerged from the artist’s explorations into drawing and we can sense in all of them the presence of a fragmented morphology where realities could be restored that were always far removed from any descriptive interpretation. The drawing that structured the pieces in this new series held a subject in its interior that was simultaneously throbbing and petrified. It ended up being seen as the seed of an iconic sign which is consumed in all its multiple nuances. At the same time, the drawing is the sole resort the motif has in facing the threat of its disappearance: if the drawing didn’t exist, the stain would expand in a haphazard process that possibly would have much to do with Ciria’s earlier abstract production. Nevertheless, we should not understand this drawing as a mere boundary for the stain: the line turned into a structural and compositional tool of the image, defined new iconographies and opened up the possibility of control and modular repetition.
Within the thematic and formal explorations found in «La Guardia Place, the mask was directly outlined in several paintings where the design dimension was manifested as a simple oval structure against the shifting, free and expansive iconography that dominated in the series as a whole. Along with a new fluid, flat and irregular sense of color, this iconographic element would determine the path for Ciria to take in his new works for the «Schandemaske» series (2008). The modular experimental root subsequently underwent several alterations, from decomposition through the active function of the void in the «Desocupaciones» («De-Occupations», 2008) series to the deceptively naive expressiveness of the «Doodles» series (2008).
But perhaps the most unexpected turn during his New York period arrived with «Cabezas de Rorschach III» («Rorschach Heads III”), a group started in 2009. Here Ciria opted for oversized faces, faces turned into battlefields where counterpoints of light, chromatic distortions and powerful foregrounds incited a raw dialog with the viewer. But those paintings are, ultimately, portraits without any other conceptual origins or formal explorations than those created from the desire to make painting a fascinating formal exercise. The ambiguity Ciria expressed between returning to the figure and his persistent anti-naturalist transformation, carried out within the framework of formal issues of representation, indicates an eagerness to constantly transgress or even deny the physical and psychological affirmation of the portrait genre. Like stage make-up applied in bursts, the colors usurped the authenticity of the skin of the figures in «Cabezas de Rorschach III«. Perhaps that’s why it seems logical that the final phase of the series rejected even the physicality of painting and directly employed collage in its construction. Perhaps that was the only possible strategy for talking about contemporary human beings acting with new names: divided, empty, unexpected, transcended, where the concept of uniqueness seems to have definitively disappeared. New identities, inter-subjectivities, undefined individuals inscribed in a new era alien to the deceptively explanatory nature of the traditional names.
The itinerary connected by the different series I have proposed through the text do not exactly present a linear evolution, without breaks or hiatuses; on the contrary, the creative consequences of Ciria’s work during his New York stay responded to a dynamic discourse that occasionally overlapped and constantly redefined the key elements of his art. If his initial figurative experiences during the ’80s were the impetus behind his abstract expressionist work in the ’90s, his investigation into drawing during his New York period was the seed of a final work group again mediating a forceful dialog between gesture and order. I am referring to the «Memoria Abstracta» («Abstract Memory») series started in 2009 and therefore created parallel to «Cabezas de Roscharch III«. The artist accentuated the two opposing poles of his vision from the ’90s: the stain, now with a condensed expressiveness like a controlled explosion in its expansion; and the grid, exact and impenetrable, laid out like a checkerboard and rigid as a machine that catalogs and distributes forms in an orderly fashion.
Rereading my first texts about this series[5], written in the heat of the immediate process of creating the series, I discovered my insistence on diametrically separating the formal results of “Cabezas de Rorschach III” and “Memoria Abstracta”, pointing to the alien nature of each one with respect to the other. In my current review of this time period in Ciria’s oeuvre, however, I find a symbolic connection that goes beyond the mere formalist interpretation I initially made of both series. In fact, beyond their plasticity, the stains operating inside the grid in «Memoria Abstracta» could be understood as anonymous individual units imprisoned in a painful order that castrates the different, subjected to a power that is nothing more than immobility and paralysis through an artificial mechanism. They are, indeed, those Rorschach heads, but diverted now towards a negation of the face and loss of recognition. In this way, the artist converted each stain into a subject between life and death, an uninspired burst, only a symbol perceived as isolated in the field of representation.
Berlin
Finding himself in a global cartography because of the idiosyncratic nature of his career, the artist has taken up a fertile diasporic position where every space he lived in functions both as a lock–closing off strategies that are now fully explored– and a doorbell –opening the way to new formal concepts. We could say that these times of physical, emotional and professional transit are when the artist set up his main laboratories for ideas and an intellectual process based on a dialog predominated that retained both his old creative imagery and new positioning strategies.
Ciria managed to forge a solid yet open-ended career, marked by a discomforting discourse in constant tension, which revolved around multiple questions concerning the direction of his art during his brief stay in Berlin. As the artist himself told me in a conversation:
A lot of questions have come up that I need to find answers for, one way or another: How abstract is my painting? Do I need to change codes and generate new techniques and languages? Should I go back to the purity of the «Máscaras de la Mirada» series? What would happen to the formal organizational arrangement of the «Memoria Abstracta» series if it were freed from the rigidly compartmentalized and geometric background? How can gestural abstraction be united with the return to the line and structure of the «La Guardia Place» or «Doodles» series?
The answers to these questions, of course, could be found with the artist himself. And they slowly began to appear from a seemingly simple strategy: «Masks of the Glance» and «Memoria Abstracta» were used as starting points and the dynamic element of the stain extracted as the raw part, the basis for starting to build a new abstract image. The stain was taken as the main iconic feature from the first series, created in the ’90s; from the New York series, Ciria took the formal strength the stain had evolved into (flatness, density and contrast) and the compositional order, although the powerful weight of the geometric structure that framed and individualized each stain disappeared. In summary, Ciria took down the scaffolding and discovered that the building could stand on its own. The stain learned the lesson, internalized the logic of its placement, overcame the expansive desire of the gesture and no longer needed any other resources to create a composition that was rigorous without being strict, ordered without being repetitive, and controlled without surrendering any expressive intensity.
The result would be the point of departure for two new groups born out of an examination of the stain –the raw part– as a border to act over or under. The first one, «Psicopompos» («Psychopomps»), established painting as a weapon to destabilize the authenticity of the photograph through a process of hybridization where each medium diluted the degree of intensity it possessed in its purest state. The second, «Puzzles», inverted the process through the dissection of fragments taken from his own iconography and their placement over the stain. In both cases, the artist transformed the format into an alien space that was stubbornly resistant to any consideration of the work as a mere map of the free expression of the artist. Heating up someone else’s image or cooling down your own are two strategies for separating yourself from the immediacy of painting. This distancing seems to meet the requirement set out by José Luis Brea for creating art in the current climate of the banalization of the culture industry, to be recorded in «cold auras» as “halos that reject any relationship with worship”[6] and put the work of art on the same level as any other artifact.
London
Conscious that contemporary art has abandoned the unique, strong directions of modernism to gain complexity and mobility, Ciria seeks to avoid a single narration in his paintings in favor of a series of interlinked possibilities. A truly productive idea frequently has an incomplete structure, denies immediate aesthetic satisfaction and points towards its subsequent development. If we were to outline a schematic map of his production, we would discover how alternate routes, nodal points and endings that could be reopened emerged from each point of departure.
«The London Boxes» series initiated in 2013 is actually the latest level of a specific line of investigation begun in 2005, when the artist reached a turning point in his production that leaned strongly to recovering the line and, after various experiments, produced its first landmark work in the «La Guardia Place» series. With this group of pieces, the artist began to understand the overall composition as a group of conscious decisions and the specific form, modulated by the drawing, was isolated as the key theme. Figurative pieces (within the broad definitions of iconic imagery permitted in contemporary figuration) were created together with totally non-referential pieces and other compositions difficult to place in either camp.
The boundary between abstraction and figuration returned as a territory of tension in «The London Boxes». Aware that even the most extreme forms of abstraction left the symbolic basis of visual arts unfulfilled to some degree, Ciria sought to create specific forms of unlikely volumes that were arranged in different planes, mounted or unbalanced, as a testimony to the destruction and metamorphosis of things. If the figurative existed here, it never promised an easy identification and the contextualization of the motif remained in suspense. We cannot define that multiple structure assembled through the drawing that centers the composition, unless it is with a strictly formal language alluding to color and shape, volumes or unusual motifs like that repeating eye-marble which seems like an ironic comment on the pre-eminence of the eye-pleasing in painting. This appears to be the only path left to us, the only possibility for triggering the word, conscious of the fact the human experience is structured through language.
In this semantic process, abstraction and representation are reactivated dialectically, while an attentive eye leads us to discover recurring structural elements, i.e., matrices that when isolated can take form as operative linguistic cores in different works of the series. This is not the first time Ciria has repeated this formulation based on distinctive basic units that acquire their purpose by means of repetition[7]; his “La Guardia Place” series boasted numerous examples where the artist time and again repeated an image subject to variations (in graphics, direction, color or internal structure), seeking extra performance from the same image.
The syntax of the matrix in «The London Boxes» also responds to the logical adjustment in the compositional packaging of each work. The artist’s initial interest is in obtaining the stability of the visual text in order to subject it later to a new state. The relevance of the matrix lies in making possible a reflection that is always underway, a systematizing of his investigation of a specific iconography. To reconsider his work demonstrated a critical questioning of his own formal structures of enormous value. On the other hand, this questioning through repetition functions in a positive, creative sense, a notion originating in the work done by Deleuze distinguishing between repetition of identity and repetition of difference, repetition of the same and repetition of the new, active repetition or passive or reactive repetition[8]. A new matrix reappearing on another work does not preserve what it denies, but rather affirms what changes, its newness, which always is essentially semantic. In order that this repetition does not become tiresome, “it must be accompanied by the play of creativity which will add something different to the repetition”[9].
Hybrid, cold, and extremely complex despite its apparent simplicity, «The London Boxes» link together rhetorical devices which seem to respond to the lack of clarity of a contemporary world where any fixed positioning, be it territorial, ideological or spiritual, has disappeared. An instability analyzed from the ironic hedonism of the pleasure of painting, an act as sterile as it is provocative, but able to distort the comfortable eye glance through a solid thought for liquid times. The surprising thing is that, in the end, it is only painting.
THE CITY OF 100 DOORS
The work of a curator fundamentally involves reflection, research, dialog with the artist or artists involved, the articulation of concepts and creation of a discourse that contributes new ideas and original connections. Systems of inclusion and exclusion are always at play in the decisions of the curator and should be used, not as parameters for building a universal concept, but with the awareness that the narrative could have been told another way. Everything can always resolve itself through writing, the field I consider central to the curator’s activity as a territory that makes it possible to reconsider positions and adjust the margins of uncertainty which surrounds contemporary artistic production.
In this vein, I think the idea of the curator as cartographer suggested in the early ’90s by Ivo Mesquita is still largely valid today. That idea in turn drew on the methodology concepts employed by psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik in her study of desire in the industrial culture era. For Ivo Mesquita, «the work of the curator / cartographer becomes a kind of travel diary where the landscapes discovered and roads traveled are recorded. In this manner, an exhibition –the final goal of the expedition of this curator– identifies the creative practices, systems of perception, the elements that will conquer a territory to practice it and the directions for it to be intelligible. The exhibition also offers itself as its own explanation”[10].
It is true that maps, the product of the work of the cartographer, are a distortion of reality made through the use of scale (implying a decision about the most meaningful details), projection (altering forms and distances), and the symbol (graphic element synthesizing the features of the real). Without those signs, it would be as useless as the Bellman’s map in the Lewis Carroll, who tried to portray the sea without any vestiges of land. In fact, it was a blank sheet of paper. Perhaps it is necessary to be aware that the curator’s voice always involves distortion mechanisms. But through control and knowledge of those techniques, it can also be an operative form for making the complex orography of contemporary art legible and accessible.
All these ideas[11] were on the table when the work process for Las Puertas de Uaset (The Doors of Uaset) started. And more simply, one question: What could or should an exhibition be that collects the key elements to a body of work so versatile, wide-ranging and structured as that of José Manuel Ciria? At first, the size and intricacy of the Tabacalera as an exhibition space pushed me to think of a kind of «descriptive manual», outlining in a clear and compartmentalized manner the principal work groups created by the artist, as I briefly summarized them in the preceding pages. It would be, therefore, an exhibition that analyzed his career from the consolidation of his abstract language in the mid-’90s and subsequently show the different directions he has pursued up to the present. This linear narrative structured around major landmarks created a script that was too closed, with few possibilities for interaction. The safe path implied an all too obvious ending: linear chronology, series, stage, independent values, clearly justified interrelationships, safe and generalized results.
Another option was to only show his most recent works, the ones currently being worked on in the studio for his next gallery exhibitions. The new pieces would surely inspire interest among critics, collectors and followers of the artist’s work. A strategy that avoided conflict, prone to separate the exhibition from any comprehensive analyses of events and thoughts that triggered a given present. The decisive, immediate nature of that strategy would offer an enlightening image of the artist’s current activity but hide the creases and folds that explain a continuity, change of attitude or simple touch up of the style.
Between the retrospective option and most recent work strategy, a very diverse array of options for making our way into Ciria’s work presented themselves. The exhibition should, in any case, detect central themes and point out accidents; reveal transformations and connect recurring options; but always marking a possible access route that would act from a new tension and create an instability that would encourage the viewer to take a stand. The important thing was not the novelty of the concept compared to other exhibitions about the artist, but the need of the exhibition itself.
We took as our starting point a text by Ciria himself, published in 2002 under the title Signos sin Orillas (Signs without Limits):
The painter could try to demonstrate the association of ideas, offering an «aesthetic» ambiance or environment, conceived and created for that purpose. The painting, perhaps, never could return to be interpreted as an isolated element. However, the market will always show the dissection and the logical dismemberment. Exhibitions as concepts formed by different works, elements or objects and with a comprehensive vision. Therefore, works that limit themselves to a single assumption or argument that time has left to fend for themselves. A weird “conceptualization” of painting, which struggles to create a platform for legitimization without finding the appropriate discourses. It becomes infected by the banality of multi-media adventures, and they in turn long to have the same format as painting.[12]
The problems presented by articulating the explanatory aspect as the re-enactment of a certain way to approach the artist is present in his statement. Even more than the uniqueness and specific nature of a kind of painting, as Ciria has created in a high percentage of his work in a traditional format, the relationship between its specific nature as an independent piece and its integration in a broader discourse within an exhibition creates an inevitable semantic fluctuation. The same forms, same colors, the same material, but different meanings produced by the eye that organizes the explanatory experience. The interpretation is always produced in and by «subordination» to an order, a task assumed today, with widely varying levels of interest and effectiveness, by the curator.
This introduction to the curatorial process for this exhibition, although quite extensive, is a way of addressing the variables that presented themselves in outlining the nodal points that were framing the routes for accessing Ciria’s work. At this point, readers will have suspected or understood the exhibition title refers to the ancient city of Uaset, known by the Greeks as Thebes and today resting beneath Luxor, baptized by Homer as the City of 100 Doors. The figure, inexact but descriptive of a core open in many directions, exemplified that intricate network of ideas, concepts and formulations developed in Ciria’s work.
Using a fictional narrative, this new, metaphorical Uaset, viewed from the perspective of Google Earth today, would be built on terrain with numerous hills and valleys. Its central core would be bordered by a wall with a steep ledge crossed by numerous diverging tracks. The central area would be defined by an intricate network of paths that cross or divide in two, blind alleys, unexpected bends, and two main thoroughfares notable for their width. The first one, known as «Máscaras de la Mirada«, would have been built starting in 1993, in what amounted to a consolidation of the city’s identity. Around this street, adapted to the terrain and therefore winding and twisting, other streets, avenues and plazas emerged to shape cores which, despite being integrated into a global cartography, began to be understood as micro-spaces with their own working dynamic. There will be bridges like «El Jardín Perverso«, built with leftover materials from other buildings and acting as the main traffic hub connecting the different neighborhoods. The necessity of establishing a second central axis capable of taking on the constant flow of departures and arrivals soon became evident. Back in 1999, it was decided to start work on «Constructed Dreams«, with the grid serving as the initial control element to impose order along its route. Over the years, both roads were advancing along parallel paths, but their progress showed a mutual inclination that would lead both roads to converge and collide in a great plaza that was named «Memoria Abstracta«. Recently, unanticipated settlements around the city have created a diffuse periphery, with still unoccupied open areas, where the specific, orthodox functions of traditional urban life have been replaced by a broken territory that some call «The London Boxes».
When Jean Baudrillard said “the territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it; henceforth, is the map that precedes the territory”[13], he was anticipating the effectiveness, legibility and democratization of maps in our world. No longer an exclusive tool for experts but now one for any citizen to carry around in their pocket, the map leads us around the city and enables us to inhabit the space, even knowing it is a falsified, hierarchical and incomplete field. The imaginary cartography we are suggesting for our Uaset is as limited as any map, but it will enable us to penetrate with a certain guarantee of success into an unsettled territory still caught up in a process of expansion.
«Máscaras de la Mirada» is indeed the most extensive of all the series developed by Ciria. The keys to his language are created there and numerous work groups are drawn from it. Predominantly expressionist and gestural, the stain functions as the lead actor against the decisive geometric sense the formal proposals of «Constructed Dreams» will require. Later, we will go more deeply into the complexity of both series, which do not only involve opposite sides with respect to gesture and order, just as «Abstract Memory» is much more than a tense exercise in pushing the dialog between both keys to the limit.
The three series are controlled by the same theoretical platform organized by means of conceptual units, divisible in turn into other units, and capable of being combined among themselves. This platform, consistent in its detailed analysis of the formal elements making up the painted image, resulted in the creation of four major sections or categories for discussion: geometric compartmentalization, controlled chance techniques, pictorial levels and formats, and iconographic archives. This theoretical program of typological considerations gave rise in the ’90s, with «Máscaras de la Mirada» as the model example, to a kind of painting that was labeled «radical automatism with a surrealist psychological base and deconstructive model of the image»[14]. «Sueños Construidos» revisited this same pre-conceptual field but the result from the combination supplanted the radical automatism in favor of a systematic geometric typology based on rigid linear compartmentalization. «Memoria Abstracta«, as the result or consequence of both groups, can be viewed as an absolute purification of his discourse, where both the geometry and stain carried out a precise role. This linearity, based on predominance, replacement and contrast, will be left behind in his most recent work by means of a strange body: «The London Boxes» series, characterized by the recovery of line as a structural tool, emphasis on the symbolic foundation, perseverance in repetition and use of formal syntagmas.
The central theme of the exhibition began to take form. The point of departure were the three series which had served over the years as the main underpinning for the abstract discourse of the artist: the final coda would be the hybrid form of «The London Boxes», a summary and synthesis of the other directions the artist had developed, fundamentally from the beginning of his New York period. In this sense, the cartography must not be viewed as closed, but rather open to a new hybrid process of construction. Transversal concepts also began to present themselves and little by little they would finally determine the complex selection process of the pieces: the relation between theoretical discourse and material production, use of language, re-appropriation, module, time, memory and, overshadowing all other considerations, painting. A complex term, this last one, for an artist who has repeatedly declared in a somewhat sarcastic tone: «I don’t do painting».
A painting exhibition?
Delueze remarked that a philosopher already has enough to do between creating concepts and formulating the system than to take on the responsibility of explicitly stating the problems that surround his philosophy. That is a job for the history of philosophy:
Philosophers contribute new concepts, explain them but do not tell, or at least not completely, which problems those concepts are answering. […] The history of philosophy, rather than repeating what a philosopher said, has to say what he must have taken for granted, what he didn’t say but is nonetheless present in what he did say.[15]
Las Puertas de Uaset doesn’t seek, to paraphrase Deleuze, to repeat Ciria but rather to incorporate those words which have determined, obviously or subtly, the entire evolution of his artistic thought. From a theoretical point of view, these lines seek to be an example of that thought. From an explanatory viewpoint, it looked to include those concepts as an integral part of the exhibition, through a selection of works that leave wide gaps in the artist’s overall evolution and continue to create relations yet to be cataloged. The reason is because we are here, in this diffuse zone where we can build the new metaphoric Uaset, whose roads and borders are based on their malleability. In contrast to a concept designed to establish a canon by fossilizing concepts and converting them into simple universals, Las Puertas de Uaset seeks to position itself more as a tool box for thinking about Ciria’s work without ever denying the relevance of other constructions.
In the same way a philosopher creates concepts, an engineer builds bridges and a cartographer makes maps. But what exactly does an artist build? How do we define that medium of activity that can go from a traditional format to an action, appropriation, or alteration of a HTML code? An artist works in a broad enough framework today to classify their world in an orthodox fashion. The diversity of creative works now are legitimized not by the standards governing the traditional theory of styles, but by the fact every concept has the power and right to answer to its own laws.
The traditional fine arts have had to accept that in contemporary art, the medium is changing and breaking with its borders, boundaries and conventions. That is what happened with the urinal Duchamp prepared in 1917 and placed in an art institution so that it would immediately mutate from an object of common use to a poetic subject and artistic artifact. It was Duchamp himself who made that statement about «as dumb as a painter». For Ciria, he never stopped being «only a painter in the deepest and most profound sense of the word”[16]. In fact, painting has arguably been the most discussed and questioned of the traditional media. The thesis proclaiming its demise that started in 1970s ended up triggering an ongoing crisis in painting, even during periods of its apparent positive recovery[17]. The predictability of certain painting conventions as determined by the standards of modernism, and the accusation of having turned into an «overused language”[18], radically changed its position as a privileged medium. From being the sounding board for the various options that Western visual culture drew on, painting passed to a seemingly peripheral position –save for a notable handful of exceptions– in the development of creative options that came to define the unsettled territory of postmodernism.
The potential death of painting worked as a synecdoche of a whole (the concept of art itself) which appeared to impose the urgency of an ending that never happened. The fondness of historians for metaphors of death and killing to talk about the dis(continuity) of processes was striking. The announcements never suggested a literal halt to traditional creative media; as Hal Foster noted, “what it was dealing with was the formal innovation and historical significance of these media”[19].
In 1977, Rosalind Krauss did a well-known analysis[20] of contemporary sculpture that revealed the appearance on the Western art scene of a series of three-dimensional works employing previously unknown techniques that, for lack of a precise term to name them, wound up simply being called sculptures. In doing so, she echoed the critical opinions which had championed that kind of manipulation in service of the post-war American art scene.
In that critique, categories such as sculpture and painting were mixed, stretched and twisted in an extraordinary display of elasticity, revealing the way a cultural term could expand its meaning to refer to virtually anything. [21]
Working from the awareness that sculpture and painting are historically defined categories and not universal, Rosalind Krauss proposed a new future that broke with modernist practice and conceptualization and therefore could not be conceived in a historicist way. If the transformation of the painting discipline was not as radical an upheaval as it was in sculpture in those first few years, it is true that many subsequent practices now directly linked to post-modernism were looking to position the medium in an expanded artistic field. Soon painting would have to be modified with an adjective due to its new elasticity; the hybrid and installation forms would turn into apparently indispensable conditions for rescuing painting from its lethargy.
There was a growing impulse throughout the career of Ciria to go beyond the traditional format. It pushed him to create works in other media like graffiti, photography, video, installations and hybrid resolutions with painting. However, we sense a high level of caution in these works, always timely and forceful, as if their approval had passed through the filter of two simple but effective questions: Is this technical-formal approach necessary? Does it add anything on the conceptual level? First and foremost, Ciria belongs to that generation implicated in the relevance of painting, who had to consider more than once that perhaps the only possible fate for the medium was to attach itself to that other form of painting which «abandoned almost everything: the canvas, frame, wall, the genres…”[22], and embodied a new modality, future painting, which would know how to give a “detailed report on its own extinction”[23]. A form of painting whose result could only be an unresolvable paradox: painting which, in order to survive, must distance itself from the categories that had defined it over centuries. A painting concealed behind the orthodox tale the avant-garde movements have spun about its fate, considered as a linear, progressive process in a permanent state of change for its survival.
Las Puertas de Uaset is an exhibition, we are declaring now, of painting. Some pieces passed through different experimental cores; others firmly clung to the traditional format; but in every case they answered to a planned program involving the thoughtful selection of materials and expressive media. On one hand, they looked to construct the gestures appropriate to them (their own voice projected in their own time) and, on the other, to avoid a banal form of painting doomed to immediate obsolescence.
Memoria Abstracta
The great entrance area of the Tabacalera is really a destination. While walking through the different exhibition spaces of the building, I was fantasizing about the possibility of turning the structure around to reverse the route. That way, the arcaded space would be the culmination and conclusion of the routes traveled throughout the exhibition. That setting, unavoidable as point of departure, also functioned as a trap: what was shown there had to have a character that absolutely distinguished it but simultaneously give legibility for what would come next.
The Memoria Abstracta installation was tried out previously at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest. I say tried out because it never managed to establish the different heights needed for the canvases constituting it there. That meant a notable reduction in both the number of viewing points for the spectator and the expressive capacity of the work. The entrance area of the Tabacalera was the perfect space to try again and mount this work in its full complexity. That was the distinctive, distinguishing piece which, due to the nature of its staging, would artistically inhabit the space. Without associating it to any sudden aesthetic-formal nomadism, it revealed an unusual side to the formalization of Ciria’s work: a way of thinking based on the translation of his creative vision to a three-dimensional arrangement, as if the chromatic tension and arrangement would enable the work to continue to be perceived as a reflection on painting. It was also a piece capable of giving legibility to the rest of the exhibition by dealing with a vigorous investigation, extreme in its contrast between stain and geometry, about the meaning of constructing an abstract image today.
Stain and geometry, the twin axes of this piece, were the echoes of an inherent historical objectification of the opposing ways of understanding abstraction that were formed with modernism. Ciria’s investigation of this principle which spawned the heroic avant-gardes started up in his painting during the ’90s as part of a post-heroic and even post-minimalist abstraction. It would be supplanted for the bulk of his New York period and recovered, starting in 2009, as part of a process of containment and deeper exploration. But the «Memoria Abstracta» series was not only seeking formal resolutions of a greater depth than those developed in the ’90s, but the construction of a new controlled, rigid and strict universe instead. To explain this combination, the artist referred to the social «straitjackets in which we live, the small margin for maneuver we have for changing anything of what happens around us, of the barriers and differences that politicians and our religious guides impose and stress among us, of solitude and lack of communication”[24]. Although it forms an essential part of the discourse, the meaning of the series was not resolved with social significance. «Memoria Abstracta» is complete abstraction and painting itself is the theme. As Mondrian used the horizontal-vertical formula as the theosophical root of a revelatory, transparent new painting, Ciria searches for a monumentality that pressures the dialectical thinking that exists between reason and expression, figure and background, the ensemble and individual unit, assonance and dissonance. In this way, not one code of his work is passive or random now, nor does it escape from the controlling order.
The Memoria Abstracta installation allows some of the stains –in reality, painted and wrinkled canvases– to release themselves through a spatial game involving different heights. The geometric grid on the floor functions as a map that may block off the direction of the stain or may let it be released in a horizontal projection towards the ceiling. If we keep up the social interpretation we referred to before, Ciria might be integrating an optimistic meaning into the series as a whole. A formal interpretation is one way to access a new degree of tension for the modular objectivity –still clinging to the two-dimensional– and the subjectivity of the color –volumetric and searching for a way out– that characterizes the entire series. The canvas is now transformed into a mise-en-espace and the work is not only what it (re)presents, but rather a complex field of relationships between image and viewer. he uniqueness of the site and the formal instability of the work (not a closed canvas with a unified perspective now but a complex, variable scenario) creates an installation understood as transitivity. In this way, in contrast to the instant achieved in the static modulation of the classic work, this work turns into an amplified visual experience. By inhabiting and not just contemplating the work, the viewer is transformed into an agent who needs to make sense of the space, clarify its meaning and involve himself in a chain of decisions (how and from where to view, where to go in, stay along the edge, center the eye or take in the entire ensemble), all of which involves an extension of perception. This is not the same kind of theatricality that Michael Fried attributed to minimalist art but rather a trip into the guts of the formal image by Ciria, by means of codes that now are oversized, out of their element, and hanging in suspense. Time, space and memory as the thematic cores of the work.
Throughout his evolution, Ciria has been ready to change, and fairly often, the form of his work, even if none of the phases he went through ever completely cut the cord to the rest of his work. The creation of the «Memoria Abstracta» series takes as its point of departure a 2008 piece, Flowers (for MLK), which emerged in a moment of doubt and experimentation about the geometric, as the artist himself explained:
I was working on the geometric backgrounds for three weeks. I wasn’t sure what I was going to paint on top of them: a stick figure, abstract stains? Then one night, after I finished a background, I was looking at that surface for hours and said to myself: What a shame I’m not a geometric painter. But other backgrounds filled with geometric compartments were on the verge of being completed, so I had make a single decision for the five canvases in preparation. (…) The Flowers (for MLK) piece was a tremendous surprise and a return to my own memory. The next day, without thinking any more about it, I put the 2 x 2 meter canvas down on the floor, opened the prepared buckets of red, orange-yellow and black oil paint, and began to paint small stains using those colors in each square. After several sessions, the piece was finished.[25]
The geometry functions as a binding, cohesive element in the work of Ciria. In this series, it becomes more radicalized and carried out a new direction based on an order, an ultra-order we could say, that rejected any lyricism in favor of an internalized law that gave new living conditions –or a form of strangulation, depending on the compositions– to the stain. If we take Abrupto (2009) as an example, one of the most powerful pieces from the start of the series, we discover the gridwork is the core of all the possibilities: two concentric squares mark off an interior controlled by the same module. The presence of the square is emphasized as a physical object within which stains of color burst in an orderly fashion. These stains create their own space, each one modulated by their own light, independent pulsations that maintain the sensation of a mass that is breathing and looking to survive. A space emerges multiplied through small space-time capsules where the active element is the expressive force of the color. Ciria is searching for the essence of the formal resources «geometry» and «order». But this search does not arise from an intellectual projection derived from a prepared dogma as his earlier abstract pieces did. Essence is not a tool for Ciria to find a pure idea, but the road on which to reach an intersection, create a short circuit, encourage a collision to explode in front of the viewer’s eyes.
The entire «Memoria Abstracta» series considers this conflict frankly and directly. The border of the medium itself, what Michel Fried called the literal figure, acts as the grid in the Despertar (Wake Up, 2009) polyptych. An unusual experiment within the group, this difficult to classify work functions as a puzzle where the 27 different pieces are destined not to fit together. The stain acquires a varied morphology (linear grids, bursts, stars…) and sink into the interior of each panel. Its projection as an image does not come together, remaining unfinished and elusive, and is virtually moved beyond the medium’s border. We will see later that this resolution was a return to the compositional codes of «Sueños Construidos«, one of the most interesting chapters together with «Máscaras de la Mirada«, and will figure prominently in the course of this exhibition. They are, in short, round trip routes that upset the perspective of the art critic or historian who wants to strictly classify each one of his periods.
The use of the word
Words have been present in the painting world throughout art history, from the legends designated for an iconographic interpretation in medieval art up to their repeated use, with different aims, in the modernist movements. The relationship between formal and linguistic codes flourished in the 20th century as an effprt «to explore adjoining realms and making them cooperate in a semantic union that is perhaps one of the clearest indications of what Octavio Paz called the «nostalgia of meaning» appropriate to our time”[26].
The need to be able to communicate with the viewer sought by Ciria led him to depict the word within the image at various stages of his career. In the early Artista Atrapado (Trapped Artist, 1989), he created a unique self-portrait that seemed to be drawn from the myths of Icarus and Phaeton: the artist’s figure, transformed into a kind of exasperated hand, falls after attempting to approach the shining star that shimmered in the upper part of the composition. On both sides of this central axis, the artist added words which appeared to reflect his theoretical concerns at that time. Reading horizontally, “Alfabeto”, “Significado”, “Azar”, “Experimento” and “Concreto” («Alphabet», «Meaning», «Chance», «Experiment» and «Specific») were placed on the left and “Conjunto”, “Abstracto”, “Lenguaje” and “Cultura” («Group», «Abstract», «Language» and «Culture») to the right. Other concepts such as “Contexto”, “Espacio”, and “Aportación” («Context», «Space» and «Contribution») will appear in later works by the artist, such as Actitud and Cruz (Attitude and Cross), both from 1991 and produced from grid compositions of various colored squares. The presence of words and texts in his formal work was picked up again with the dramatic graphic symbols and consciousness of a provocateur found in the “Palabras” («Words») series Ciria created in 2002.
Those examples proved to be too emphatic in their formalization and meaning to fit within the analytical concept of Las Puertas de Uaset. The use of words should be present through pieces that would express, apart from the presence of the linguistic sign, Ciria’s thoughts about the meaning:
There is nothing resembling a literal meaning, if by meaning one understands a clear, obvious conception without caring about the context or what is in the mind of the artist or viewer. It is a meaning that could serve as a limit to interpretation of the work by existing prior to any interpretation, a meaning devoid of significance. Interpretation does not exist without the work and never produces results, except for purely analytical ones. [27]
Consciencia, Pintura and Voz (Conscience, Painting and Voice) are three pieces the artist began to create in 1992. Over geometric backgrounds, he arranged green capital letters using stencils to spell out the words that gave each piece its name. Years later –during his first months in New York in 2006, before his painting went off in a new direction–, the artist went back to those canvases and applied the red and white gestural stains characteristic of the «Máscaras de la Mirada» series he was trying to conclude at that time. I consider this widespread field of activity extremely suggestive for two reasons. On the one hand, these works constituted a critique of the merely sensual, eye-pleasing nature of a type of painting marked by the absence of any conceptual legibility. On the other, the painted gesture functioned here as a correction that blocked the false transparency of what we understand by meaning. Ciria subtly considered the differences that exist between what is said and what is communicated, conscious that, as Graciela Reyes has pointed out:
The words have meaning in and of themselves. However, communication demands much more than exchanging pre-established meanings. Think of the difference between asking, «What does that word mean?» and «What do you want to say with that word?» We are asking for information in the first case about the language, which can be found, for example, in the dictionary. In the second case, we are considering the problem of interpretation, which has to do with the intention of the speaker in using the word: we are asking for the meaning we must interpret in that context. [28]
The complexity of the paratextual relationship between the word and image Ciria considers in his works serve not as mere interchanges of meanings, but rather as a tool so that word and image both have their respective meaning in a common context. More than the meaning, what interests Ciria is the concept joining with the signifier «to constitute a linguistic sign or a complex meaning that can combine with various combinations of linguistic signifiers”[29]. From this same interest in semantic ambiguity, the artist includes full words[30] in these pieces, meaning categories of speech larger than having an independent meaning –as we said before, that appears in the dictionary– where the context (in this case formal) determines its possible meaning to a great degree. The artist uses words loaded with content that appear to refer to a meta-artistic question, albeit serving as representational, iconographic, formal and compositional resource at the same time. In short, this work is in the same vein as the philosophical response the late Wittgenstein gave to the question, «What is the meaning?» He pointed out, » There can be no such thing as meaning.»
Consciencia, Pintura and Voz, assembled as a triptych in the explanatory section of Las Puertas de Uaset , serve as a conceptual framework of a piece seeking to feed off the impossibility of being immediately grasped by the viewer. I refer to Distorsión Semántica (Semantic Distortion, 2002), a piece that incorporated a collage of fragments from earlier paintings, cut and mounted, secured to a metal bar hanging from the ceiling one meter away from a wall. It was painted on site by Ciria using brushes and also contained a printed text with a large body of type. In this way, the artist broke with the sequential nature of reading and introduced an anomalous, unanticipated element into the literary quotient. The perceptive system understands the collage interrupts comprehension of the text, turning into a kind of visual noise, an excess one has to make the effort to eliminate to be able to complete the reading. The painting’s discourse interrupts that of the word and vice versa. The viewer, owner of that distracted perception typical of our visually opulent times, can only squint and look at the painting with one eye, and the jargon that appears to explain it with the other. We could recall the texts of Roland Barthes about the death of the author, in which he proposes another way of understanding the work: it is the reader who constructs the text, written and visual. But in truth, Ciria was suggesting the need to articular the discourse and image coherently, so that both strata recognize and justify each other.
Ten years before, Ciria created Hablando de Pintura (Speaking of of Painting, 1992), a work where he introduced an offset print of the catalog text where the piece was reproduced and commented on: the painting and description of the painting, image and writing. It was an artifact that placed «painting in an infernal circle, turning it into a mirror of the «word over art» and, turning the tables, by not saying anything, offering nothing more than its own inability to communicate, then the discourse of one cancels out the visual quality of the other”[31]. Ciria reflects on the difficulty of adapting theoretical thinking to practical formulation in Distorsión Semántica, an intention that will always be troubled by variables that can’t fit into previous protocols, no matter how responsible the artist might be in breaking down, classifying, and conceptualizing each and every resource that goes into his work. However, the artist is also aware that only by starting from a medium with a theoretical basis is it possible to create a form of painting that isn’t destined to fall into the void of the decorative, trivial and banal. The text on the wall, adapted to this complex paradox, read:
This is not an attempt to intentionally exemplify a stance that is certainly widespread among contemporary formal artists, one that defends the unintelligible and uninterpretable nature of all artwork. In all probability, the ultimate essence expressed in all artwork resists being reduced to logos, because that essence does not rise from logical questions, nor something that can be explained through language. The challenge of interpretation and criticism. If abstract painting appear to us in the form of symbols that speak intimately to our emotions and feelings, for being the enigmas they are, they urge us to try to make a greater effort to reveal what they mean. To express what is left unsaid. Philosophy and art. Thought and painting. In-depth theory and precognitive awareness».
Modernism acted, at least during its origin, as if all representational art had a traditional conception of the world. Abstract art was a reaction to the modernist sense of reality that meant, in the end, the construction of its own laws for painting. That independence would be diverted into an unavoidable unintelligibility of an art that claimed to be universal in its own right. As Donald Kuspit pointed out, the whole situation was tinged with irony:
Abstract artists wrapped themselves in the banner of an unintelligible artistic language to affirm the mysterious nature of art as such, saving it in that way for timelessness and transcendence. But they also held that their language boasted the only kind of modern intelligibility.[32]
Ciria demands a scenario where he can consider modes of compression, contextualization and analysis for creating in the present day. An effective philosophy of art and artistic practice mediated by theoretical investigation. Thinking regarding the contemporary image, hypothesis about the ones to work on and conclusions to debate. A language capable of coherently articulating the changes being produced in the evolution of what we still call the visual arts. And he asks for all that under the label (incomplete but inevitable when a rapid definition is needed in times of inept manuals, inaccurate lists and perverse rankings) of abstract painter.
Sueños Construidos
Based on the resolutions of arrangement that happened during the «Máscaras en la Mirada» series, a new group named «Sueños Construidos» was born in 1999. Its central creative theme was construction of the image from the fragmented accumulation of partial strata to be juxtaposed and superimposed. Strange bodies and painted fragments of the artist himself made up a whole that never tried to hide its boundaries and therefore the sense of the work itself being constructed. In fact, Abel H. Pozuelo pointed out that this group as a whole achieves:
The maximum level of warming up to use of the combinatory in the entire period. In its iconography, the series incorporated what are properly called everyday objects (common plastic bags, toys, cartons and magazines…), pre-existing images (emulsified and photograph formats) and what was objectively painting. The latter was particularly noteworthy for making use of scraps and clippings from his own work that had previously gone under the knife. [33]
The central theme of the series was the shaping of the pieces themselves, its own materialization. In fact, it is possible to perceive very clearly the experimentation with various procedures and the building process. That happened with a singular beauty and complexity in Landscapes (2001), a monumental piece that now accompanies the visitor all the way through one of the spacious hallways of La Tabacalera. It is a changing landscape produced from three different pieces of the same series, a mobile labyrinth where the formats engage each other in dynamic interactions, whether superimposing themselves on each other or some accumulating on top of others. Once again, Ciria came out from the wings because the construction itself and the polysemy (multiple meanings) of the image required it. In fact, these constructed dreams seemed to repeat the structure of the dreamlike material, fragmented but susceptible to interpretation through analysis that reveal the desires from which they originated to us. An image that hides as much as it reveals, an architecture that, despite its apparent instability, appears to be assembled by means of an exhaustive reasoning of balanced and unbalanced conditions.
It was not the first time Ciria combined prepared materials, making use of their heterogeneous and fragmented condition. This idea was included as an integral part of the study by Claude Lévi-Strauss about the figure of the bricoleur (handyman). In our do-it-yourself times, he is the one who works with his hands, adapting instruments he finds available around him that were not specially made for the operation they are finally used for through a process of trial and error. But in the «Sueños Construidos» series, it is Ciria’s own artistic universe that is the principal target for appropriation.
If Ciria is, as has sometimes been said, a bricoleur of unlimited voraciousness, appropriating everything in his reach in order to reuse it, his own production occupies a special place among his materials. Ciria is an autobricoleur. In this sense he belongs to a long, classic tradition of artists who feed their creativity in large measure from their own work: artists such as Degas and Gaugin, De Chirico and Picasso, who frequently picked up earlier motifs and fragments again in order to rework them, going back constantly over their own footsteps. A word exists in English, to cannibalize («canibalizar»), to define the process of extracting pieces from a broken machine and using them to repair other machines still in use. A cannibalism or self-cannibalism of this genre encompasses all Ciria’s work and sometimes involves the use of specific fragments of failed paintings destroyed by the artist to create new pieces. [34]
Fractured, polarized by differences of opinion, Ciria takes on the contemporary world artistically from the very heterogeneity that determines it: the fragment, the clipping, the leftover. His work of reintegration as a whole does not imply the imposition of a closed vision but rather throws into relief a framework of levels that, in his dialog, manages to erect an image. Ciria revises here the shapes of Cubism but above all of Russian constructivism, from Tatlin to the «painterly architectonics» of Lyubov Popova. This track favoring the heroic geometric line implies a cooling down of the gestural expression of the generic «Máscaras de la Mirada» series. It looks ahead to some of the works influenced by Malevich that Ciria created at the start of his New York period.
The collage, with its ability to bring elements from various spheres into the same context to create a whole that is no longer purist but uncertain in essence, has probably been the most powerful destructive and constructive instrument invented in 20th century art. The plural invaded the space of a work of art that was singular until that point. Its introduction into the canon by Picasso in his famed Still Life with Chair Caning (1912), and expansion shortly thereafter through the assembly and construction of sculpture through found materials and objects taken from real life, soon prompted a rapid response in the invention of the ready-made by Duchamp. Now it was an object found and chosen, but not produced, by the artist.
As we previously indicated, the response to the forms of the historical avant-gardes is present in Ciria’s work. He has sensitively, carefully and consciously viewed the turbulent nature of modernism, the codes of surrealist automatism and geometric reductionism. The first option was the bridge to a gestural expressionism he always attempted to moderate through compartmentalization but also, or as a result of, reworking the collage tradition. Even in a piece as early as Cadences (1991), Ciria was already distributing a rhythmic, serpentine trail of coins over the full expanse of the canvas, whose material nature and value responded to the tactile, expressionistic sensuality of the surface of the canvas with a forceful opposition. This early experiment, intuitive in nature, was soon organized through the systematic logic of his analytical fields.
To think from the fragment and transform his own production was the key to Visiones Inmanentes, a polyptych created in 2001 and consisting of five monumental collages with two sides, wrapped in a thick covering of transparent plastic and hung from the ceiling. Made up of fragments of a tarpaulin, plastic, paper and various objects, the ten faces recount a dizzying story about the creative process of the artist and his way of understanding painting from an unorthodox perspective controlled by decentralization. No single fragment could lay exclusive claim to being the protagonist because all functioned as vital organs spilled into the interior of a strange body. The fragments, most of them confiscated from mutilated pieces and removed from their original context, succumbed to a multiple organism whose order had been misplaced under the same skin:
The collages of the Immanent Visions series, with their framework of superimposed grids, represent an Apollonian way to portray the interior of the organism. Everything in them tends to become skin to replace ripped or lost skin. Everything is skin, because the skin is the vehicle for making the flesh visible and comprehensible. That was how Apollo would see the satyr’s skinned body, a way of analytically articulating the reality of the inner body to give it an illusion of order and take away its horrendous, repugnant appearance. But we can imagine a more literal depiction of the inner body, a representation based on Marsyas’ perception. In this case, when the skin is ripped off, the innermost part of the body emerges as pure flesh without a surface that makes sense, without the thread of Ariadne. What beat beneath the skin was not another skin now, but rather something completely different. It was, strictly speaking, something inconceivable: the flesh as a thick magma, halfway between liquid and solid form.[35]
With its tactile presence and visual absence, this skin encloses a maze-like, enigmatic architecture. In contrast to the pacifying, Apollonian effect of painting to which Lacan refers[36], Visiones Inmanentes disrupts the balance of the imagination-symbolic lure from the side of excess. In this fashion, the artist displays the remains of the real in order to upset the contemplative petrification of the subject, by leading them from one side to the other on a nomadic wandering from the distorted interior of each collage to the totality of an open, rhizomatic ensemble.
Created a year later, the El Sol en el Estómago polyptych was naked, sans skin and internally modulated by geometry, an immediate response to Visiones Inmanentes. There are nine structures, each one composed of a single surface area made from military tarpaulins, on which smaller surfaces made of plastic and canvas tarpaulins are attached. Although not two-sided, they were again hung from the ceiling, creating a spacial compartmentalization apart from the wall which effectively acts as a mirror of the work’s inner compartmentalization. But this arrangement also worked as an inventory of a dissection where different layers have split off and formed another motif for exploration. As Javier Hontoria pointed out:
We could say that each tarpaulin is a reduced version of the piece as a whole. While we live in a state of suspense with every tarpaulin, sensing the existence of a reality that lies beneath our vision, a place we cannot see but where we know the paint is hiding, it is those same spaces that show us the full piece in all its grandeur. A frontal view of the piece does not reveal it in its totality. We do not know what is happening in certain angles that are impossible for us to see. You sense an extension of the painting just as you sense it behind each piece of overlapped tarpaulin. And walking among the spaces we go to our encounter. [37]
The remnants again functioned as an index in El Sol en el Estómago. To create the piece, Ciria gathered together different fabrics that were already prepared, re-sized to fit their new destination. The juxtaposition created a grid of squares and rectangles the artist called «comics». The overall structure did bear some resemblance to that unbreakable geometric grid that orders the narration in the pages of a comic book. However, the line that constructed that grid had disappeared to open the way for the gaps, those empty spaces between the parts that keep alive the ideas of fragility and urgency. In short, a human, sensitive feeling like the one Malevich applied to his Black Square (1915), in truth a non-geometric quadrangle where neither the sides or right angles were parallel or equal. Geometric in appearance, undeniably, but with an attentive eye we can see it also articulates notions of error, instability and injury.
The gestural component, which won the battle during the entire formal development that opened up starting with «Máscaras de la Mirada«, is now enclosed. The path of the colored stain is cut off from expanding. It logically tries to put itself in a non-referential space but it always ends up constrained by the constructed plane. In fact, each of the fabrics is a commensurable unit that has meaning based on its relation to the whole: there exists a play of weights and counterweights, full and empty spaces, that involves rational decision making on the part of the artist when he constructs the whole ensemble. That means there is an overall composition that provides a meaning to every one of the nine tarpaulins and a common thread that firmly ties the group as a whole together in its spatial arrangement. Once again, an artifact constructed through the functional linking of different pieces, a personal DIY project prepared by means of proximities, absences and remnants, consciously incomplete but surprisingly emphatic.
The London Boxes
Within a group of works that avoided the presence of a format confined to a stretcher, composed of different materials and arranged directly on the wall, Ciria created Crucified Vision in 2002. Always attentive to how his pieces functioned outside his studio, the artist included this piece the following year in his exhibition at the Moisés Pérez de Albéniz gallery in Pamplona and discovered the piece struggled in a problematic dialog with the lighting and space. When he returned to the studio, Ciria decided to create a new version that used a stretcher and included it in «Imanes Iconográficos» (Iconographic Magnets), a very interesting group created for the «Sueños Construidos» series. Now imprisoned inside the border of the format, the second version of Visión Crucificada was crossed by an aluminum bar that closed and definitively stabilized the composition, acting as a forceful break to the painted sensuality of the remnants that made up the image.
The artist himself stated[38] that this compositional resource typical of the entire suite was inspired by certain still lifes created by Dutch painter Samuel van Hoogstraten where horizontal bands restrained the compositional elements. This solution had already been formulated by Ciria in a piece like Alex’s Toys (2000), where the material opulence of the still life incorporated stuffed toys, a touching found object that showed us the audacity of Ciria in using formal resources and his practice of compulsive DIY projects typical of this period. But perhaps even more forceful from both a formal and ideological standpoint was the 2001 work Vanitas (Levántate y Anda) (Vanitas [Rise Up and Walk]). It incorporated different historical-artistic codes from Duchamp to Joseph Kosuth that, taken as a whole, formed a bold reflection about the survival of painting within contemporary visual parameters[39].
After considering various options, the three pieces mentioned above established themselves as the best possibilities from «Imanes Iconográficos» to integrate into the discourse of Las Puertas de Uaset. Although not particularly extensive, the group represented a critical point for Ciria as a maker of images by appropriating elements originating in an «archeology» expedition that explored the residual to create a new body. We finally opted for Visión Crucificada II. The choice was determined by a transversal interpretation that used this piece as the vehicle for connecting to the most recent formal discoveries by the artist. During a workday with Ciria in his Madrid studio, going through old catalogs and new projects, we discovered almost by chance the similarity between the composition of Crucified Vision II and a current drawing in the sketches leading to «The London Boxes» ensemble.
In that way, the piece extended its specific interest as one of the most intriguing doors that opened up in the wake of «Sueños Construidos». It did so with an analysis of how a painted arrangement and composition functioned, beyond the invention (iconography) and elocution (the formal calligraphy)[40], which served as the main cog for the course of action he was pursuing with “The London Boxes”. The similarity of the basic tension structures of both works was no accident. It origins were in the internalization of a visual code applied to his work in two moments of his career when the artist was paying special attention to the rational stabilization of the composition. The next step was to create a specific work for the Icono Memorizado exhibition, that accepted both sources –Visión Crucificada II and the drawing– as the point of departure for rethinking the composition as a whole like a matrix, i.e., as a different, meaningful basic unit that could operate several times with a different semantic intention.
Indeed, one of the theoretical keys that influenced Ciria’s career over the past few years, essentially beginning with the «La Guardia Place» series in New York, was the insistence on iconic syntagmas which boosted their significance by their incorporation and variation in various works. The starting point for this creative theme was the production of this series. Around 2006, Ciria began to try to unravel what were the centers of interest that, compared to other points in the image, would completely change the meaning if they disappeared or were moved significantly; those elements which, independent of their iconographic and narrative value, shaped the architecture of an image. This investigation, named DAA (Alfa Alignment Dynamic) by the artist, did not involve extracting the formal similarity of various artistic creations but rather the repetition of certain primary units that served as the main underpinning of the visual structure throughout the history of art. The artist himself offered this definition:
We are using the name Alfa Alignments to refer to all those basic «tension» structures in a painting. In any painting, except with minimalism and related schools, there are a series of primary shaping elements that create tension and facilitate composition. This is true for the entire history of classic painting and reaches up to what we understand as contemporary painting. The methodology consists of observing and «stripping» a painting until you reach its preferred/basic shaping elements. That means an empirical-analytical observation in search of the gravitational weights and lines of tension that are produced in a given composition.
In the first phase of his thinking about this new theoretical platform, Ciria seemed wrapped up in an investigation that he knew was utopian to begin with and would involve the cataloging of repeating patterns within a kind of collective imagination that would determine the unconscious strategies used throughout the history of painting to refine the visual script. The effectiveness of this reflection was later consolidated when, once the search for the common principles, lines of tension and distribution in outside works was out of the way, he proposed to isolate, dissect and study the compositional framework he built in his own images. That finally gave rise to a new way of undertaking an exhaustive analysis of the components of his own formal language.
That was the context when Ciria had access to the doctoral thesis of José Luis Tolosa titled Cambio Semántico del Módulo para su Utilización en una Práctica Pictórica [41] (Semantic Change of the Model for Use in Painting), where the professor suggested an effective formula for the modular element from his own experience as a painter. In Ciria’s search to intensify the borders of his painting, this interpretation marked a base level from which his own investigation would originate. The term module, strictly defined as a repeated figure without variation in size and shape, was replaced by matrix, alluding to the concept of a mold that gave form to something concrete and whose reproduction in series always allowed for certain degrees of alteration with respect to the original. Beginning with the variation placed on both sides of the exact border of the drawing (both its interior and relationship with the exterior-background) and the immanence of what was being defined as matrix, repetition would be understood as a methodology tool to precisely dissect all the operative forms in the production of the image.
To copy yourself or copy existing works, go back to investigate the already known, indicates a disenchantment with the myths of modernism. The faith in the linear, progressive evolution of the work of art is replaced by a critical questioning that breaks with the idea of an irreducible, universal image. In «La Guardia Place», the investigation about the matrix dealt with certain formal notions (size, internal subdivision, reversal on an axis, relation to the background, chromatic range) which impacted the semantic versatility of the original image. In «The London Boxes», the distinguishing unit took a leading role, establishing itself in the foreground and reduced the number of formal notions mentioned above. Now, the semantic variation came in large part from its arrangement within the image, not just around a two-dimensional axis, but incorporating a three-dimensional visual response through its volume. Numerous drawings prior to the painting itself acted not only as sketches but as a verification tool for analyzing the formal possibilities and conceptual model of the same pictorial project.
The iconography of Provocadamente Diacrónico accumulated an unstable overlapping of strong individualized elements and others more ambiguous in their formal description. The former were the ones that established a chain in the foreground that, taken as a whole, formed the shape of an overall matrix . Ciria would return to that concept in Circuito de Códigos, but this time codified from the reverse perspective, as if the gears had turned around and, in the process, lifted up and stripped away the excess compositional elements that were not needed now in the new arrangement. The triangular shape that provided tension and tightened the image from the upper left corner disappeared in the second piece which, in contrast, added a red band in the upper part that stabilized the image as a whole.
We won’t insist on any more detailed descriptions of this kind of resource, quite evident to the attentive eye, but we do want to offer a final comment on the well-grounded relationship the artist established between figure and background. In Provocadamente Diacrónico, the iconographic complexity is not tempered but rather accentuated by a format that possesses its own index of rhythms, frequencies, flows, stains and tracks. The integration of these “chance elocutive incidents”[42] was born from using a canvas that previously served to cover the studio floor during the creation of other pieces. In this way, the artist not only accepted the memory of the medium, but also the memory of his own career. Between 1996 and 1996, he had already created “El Jardín Perverso I”, followed by “El Jardín Perverso II” in 2003, starting from the same approach that he would promptly employ again to rework pieces from very different series. The medium that was stepped on and stained as an echo of the artistic process was recycled and valued for its expressive immediacy but, above all, for exemplifying a risky approach ruled, in turn, by a memory extraordinarily tied to the artist himself. Quite the opposite to the approach in Circuito de Códigos, where Ciria looked to make an effective monumentality determined by purification of the matrix and background, linked to one other by an accent in the middle. From there, the weight of the shape expanded to the left and the intensity of the emptiness towards the right.
Ciria mentioned the piling up of boxes and belongings resulting from his recent move to London as the point of departure for this new iconography. Of course, this possible reference was soon going be overlapped by a deep analysis of the rhetorical devices and semantic locutions of the new kind of image he wanted to construct, dense on the surface but without merely clinging to an eye-pleasing paradigm. Painting, therefore, that wanted to be contemplated and interpreted, of course not clearly (here the figurative is a simulated surface, an area of misunderstandings for the symbolic order) but from the perspective of empathetic disruption, visual deconstruction and conceptual concern. The repetition of certain matrices, and that chromatic range of reds, white, blacks and ochers in the form of bursts which tried to fill that strange morphology featured in the image, is in reality a lure for an initial recognition. The viewer is aware of being in front of a work group, a series where repeated visual data can be identified. However, each work suggests the need for an independent dissection of its poetic sensibility. There are no redundancies or cacophonies, but rather multiple qualities that create unanticipated grammars in each piece.
This process occurred very clearly in “Sentimientos Tóxicos”, a piece we identify as part of «The London Boxes» but actually originated in the experimentation with collage for “Sueños Construidos”, and returned with greater expressive meaning in the final phase of “Cabezas de Rorschach III”. Additionally, the internal structuring of the piece showed two superimposed realities that have broken their contiguity even while still sharing a similar kind of formal enunciation. Either one of the two parts function as poles for this ambivalence that avoids attempting to fit together to engage in a kind of mutual attraction-repulsion relationship. Starting from that radical nature, Ciria created a powerful image, perfectly assembled as a broken body both in its real presence as its mirror image, whichever one each of the two parts may be. Painting, therefore, that moves towards the discontinuous to be able to generate its own identity.
Speaking of identities, the artist shows us his –or at least his face, its symbolic site– through irreverent, ugly and vehement gestures in the ten pieces making up the «Sintagmas» polyptych. You commonly expect a photographic portrait to show the visible appearance of the person and allude to the invisible aspects of their identity through them. However, Ciria sought to camouflage himself through the facial expressions and painting. The magnification of the format evokes the cinematic close-up which, as Jacques Amount suggests[43], is a questioning of the psyche of the character, inviting the viewer to introduce himself into an emotional landscape created by the disproportionate enlargement of the face. Here, the landscape has been brutally invaded by fragments –composed of two or more consecutive units, following the value given by Saussure for syntagmas– of the pieces we have seen while advancing towards the final exhibition spaces of Las Puertas de Uaset.
The hybrid painting-photograph, a decisive format in the renewal of both media in postmodernism, would be a mode of activity Ciria explored at very specific times. He used it with great subtlety in his Acto Post-Racional ( Post-Rational Act, 1991) exhibition, where the layout of abstract paintings was mirrored by striking photographs from the EFE Agency archives. If the narration of the photography and painting was parallel in these works, the first series which combined them in the same format took place a decade later. In “Psicopompos” (2001-2002), Ciria executed the painting over images from advertising posters. In a second phase of this series, created during his Berlin period, Ciria supplanted the material independence of the poster in favor of digital printing on canvas, a decision which involved the texture being assumed by the weave of the canvas, establishing an ambiguous relation between painting and photography.
The same resource was employed in «Sintagmas«. The plan Ciria used for constructing his most recent pieces was now dissected to figure out which elements should be set aside, forming what kind of structured ensembles governed by what kind of internal logic. We can imagine taking a watch apart with the intention of putting it back together later. It could have two possible endings: make the internal mechanism return work as before, without concerning ourselves with the reasons why; or know the reasons that explained the why. Ciria was seeking the latter, the description of the logical functioning of the structures. But a painting, of course, is not a watch and doesn’t give the same hour for everyone. The laws governing how artistic works function are not exhausted by the action of composing and recomposing. And it is on that border between the possible and impossible that painting creates the production of a discourse capable of being quantified, where the artist triggers an ironic gesture of desperation. Theodor Adorno thought that one of the tasks of art was «elevating some confused and forgotten experiences into consciousness without <rationalizing them>». Ciria’s enthusiasm for cataloging all the possible landscapes of his discourse is a way of fighting against a contemporary hypervisibility that, without contributing either high hopes or truth, is a way of “exterminating the gaze”[44]. The dissonance between photography and painting, between the face and the formal syntagma, is only tempered in a common message of the radical illegibility of the gesture and the radical infinity of interpretations to come.
Other Itineraries
We are better situated now, after everything presented above, for addressing the problem of staging Las Puertas de Uaset as a visual and narrative artifact capable of telling a relevant story about José Manuel Ciria’s artistic career. The exhibition was created from engaging in a direct dialog with the artist in looking for the seminal works and pieces of reference in constructing his language. We committed to including the landmarks of greatest importance in shaping the stain through the techniques of controlled chance (“Máscaras de la Mirada” series); of order through a geometry capable of triggering degrees of impurity (“Máscaras de la Mirada” series); the point of maximum tension in the dialog between both extremes (“Memoria Abstracta” series); in order to culminate with his most recent series, «The London Boxes». We consider that series the most emphatic synthesis of another track of activity where stain and geometry control each other with new sensitivity through the compositional framework of the drawing, logic of the matrix and introduction of a symbolic-referential substratum.
Within those parameters, the final construction could have been diverted to include other works, some of them mentioned throughout the text. In that sense, each room of the Tabacalera became a hypothesis, a space that involved taking sides and making a decision between multiple variables. In short, we could have told many other stories. That is intrinsic to the development of an exhibition, an essential part in the curator’s thinking. We insist on it precisely because we consider it necessary to defend the value of the other pieces and discourses that were discarded in order to enunciate a definitive narrative line. But this same line always indirectly refers to another order which triggers a transversal perspective that accepts nostalgia for the untold, the discarded works and genealogies never established. To think, select, search for reciprocal orders and dialectic cores, assess the discourse’s logic, question the form and placement of each artistic element, are effective acts when they come together in a complex articulation, provisionally stable but aware that a new scalpel would be able to open it to discover another reality, another body.
An open hole exists in the exhibition, a piece that goes beyond the construction of the overall meaning. It is placed at a strategic point: the visual vanishing point of the main hallway of Tabacalera and the axis from which the viewer discovers the strange final twist of «The London Boxes». Monumental and vibrant, El Color en los Ojos del que Mira (Campo de 2.467 flores) (The Color in the Eyes of the Beholder [Field of 2,467 Flowers]) is made from the surplus remnants of the material the artist was using to construct his last collages, where he blended the iconography of his London series with the compositional resources of «Sueños Construidos«. Imagine, then, that it is pure residue, purely outward appearance, pure pollution, composed of fragments resized as a kind of flowers-mandalas and organized with a logic of fluctuating appearance. A very specific lighting introduces a subtle movement to the ensemble, shaping a phantasmagoric illusion that seems to accentuate the accessible promise of the full meaning; we are without a doubt looking at a representation of a field of flowers swaying in the wind. However, a layer of literary discourse applied by the artist makes each color –allied to its arrangement: top, bottom and center– turn into «logos». An alphabetical coding is created which can be translated as written language: «Light is the raw material of color and space is a function of that». This phrase begins a hidden text that is something greater than a conceptual game: the artistic work is evaluated based on the logic of the words, questioning the borders of visual perception and what is known. Ciria achieves in this piece a postponement of meaning, conscious that even the coded message is an open saying, a fragment of an unfinished discourse, capable of endless reuse. A piece-lure, where the thirst for the full meaning underneath its lyrical appearance is growing, is finally revealed to be an inexhaustible task. In short, it deals with not accepting the slavery of mere visual seduction and proposes art as a machine for creating meanings. Perhaps it is the moment to begin a heroic new era for painting.
[1] «The decisive theoretical program of typological reflections on the potentialities of the formal work of our painter nevertheless was created in a moment of profound crisis of his images. His expression absolutely did not arise from any form of euphoric experience codified into an ensemble of favorable results. On the contrary, it stemmed from an archive of the «sources» of formal effectiveness, revised as an initial, necessary point of support within an intense private debate on originality, then experiencing its deepest, darkest abysses through Ciria’s creative misgivings. GARCÍA BERRIO, A. and REPLINGER, M. José Manuel Ciria: A.D.A. Una Retórica de la Abstracción Contemporánea. (A Rhetorical Approach in Contemporary Abstraction) Tf Editores, Madrid, 1998, p 90.
[2] The notebook has been published in several catalogs of the artist: José Manuel Ciria. Parajes Binarios (Binary Settings), Galería Fernando Silió, Santander, 2003, pp. 77-120; José Manuel Ciria. Limbos de Fénix (Phoenix’s Limbos) Galería Bach Quatre. Barcelona, 2005, pp.141-184; Ciria. Beyond. Monasterio del Prado, Valladolid, Junta de Castilla y León, 2010, pp. 49-97.
[3] CIRIA, J.M.“El Tiempo Detenido de Ucello y Giotto y una Mezcla de Ideas para Hablar de Automatismo en Roma” (The Time Detained of Ucello and Giotto and Various Ideas for Speaking on Automatism in Rome). El Tiempo Detenido (Time Detained). Tf. Editores, Madrid, 1996, p 28.
[4] CIRIA, J.M. “Volver”. Búsquedas en Nueva York. (Return. Researches in New York.) Ediciones Roberto Ferrer, Madrid, 2007, pp. 44- 45.
[5] DELGADO, C. Ciria. Five Squares. Series Americanas (American Series). Palacio de Simeón, Diputación de Orense, 2010.
[6] BREA, J. Luis. Las Auras Frías. (The Cold Auras) El Culto a la Obra de Arte en la Era Postaurática. (The Worship of the Work of Art in the Post-Auratic Era) Barcelona, Anagrama, 1991, pp.11-12.
[7] C. DELGADO. “Repetición y Descubrimiento. (Repetition and Discovery) Nuevas Perspectivas sobre la Obra última de Ciria”. (New Perspectives on the Latest Work by Ciria). Ciria. Rare Paintings, Post-Géneros y Dr. Zaius. (Rare Paintings, Post-Genres and Dr. Zaius) Fundación Carlos de Amberes, Madrid, 2008, pp. 178-187.
[8] DELEUZE, G. Nietzsche y la Filosofía. (Nietzsche and Philosophy) Anagrama, Madrid, 1971.
[9] MALPARTIDA, D. “El Placer de la Repetición”. (The Pleasure of Repetition»). Revista de Actualidad Psicológica, xv, Buenos Aires, July 2003.
[10] MESQUITA, I. “Cartografías”. («Cartographies») POWER, Kevin (ed.) Pensamiento crítico en el nuevo arte latinoamericano. (Critical Thought in the New Latin American Art) Fundación César Manrique, Lanzarote, 2006, p. 331.
[11] Collected and expanded on in the article DELGADO, C. “¿Para Qué Sirve un Comisario?” («What Does a Curator Offer?») , published in the online magazine PAC on 12 March 2014. Available at: http://www.plataformadeartecontemporaneo.com/pac/%C2%BFpara-que-sirve-un-comisario/
[12] CIRIA, J.M. Signos sin Orillas. (Sign without Limits) Alicante, Galería Italia, 2002.
[13] CORBOZ, A. El Territorio como Palimpesto. Lo Urbano en 20 Autores Contemporáneos. (The Territory as Palimpsest. Urban Life by 20 Contemporary Authors.) Ediciones UPC, Barcelona, 2004, p. 31.
[14] GARCÍA BERRIO, A. and REPLINGER, M. Op. cit., p. 41
[15] DELEUZE, G. Conversaciones. (Negotiations) Pre-textos, Madrid, 1995, p. 261
[16] CIRIA. J. M. “La Mirada Subjetiva (fragmento). Una Posible Defensa de la Pintura”. (The Subjective Eye [fragment]. A Possible Defense of Painting) Intersticios. (Interstices) Madrid, 1999, pp. 11-40.
[17] Arthur C. Danto has pointed out that these announcements have always come, paradoxically, at times when painting was enjoying a period of very good health. DANTO, C. Arthur, “Lo Puro, lo Impuro y lo no Puro: La Pintura después de la Modernidad”. (The Pure, Impure and Unpure: Painting After Modernism) Nuevas Abstracciones. (New Abstractions) Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona, 1996, p 15. (Queen Sofia National Art Museum, Madrid; Musuem of of Contemporary Art, Barcelona)
[18] LAWSON, Thomas. “Última Salida: La Pintura”. (Last Exit: Painting) WALLIS, Brian (ed.), Arte Después de la Modernidad. Nuevos Planteamientos en torno a la Representación. (Wallis, Brian (ed)., Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation) Akal, Madrid, 2001, p. 154.
[19] FOSTER, Hal. “This Funeral is for the Wrong Corpse”. Diseño y Delito y Otras Diatribas. (Design and Crime [and Other Diatribes]) Akal, Madrid, 2002.
[20] KRAUSS. R. “La Escultura en el Campo Expandido”. La Originalidad de la Vanguardia y Otros Mitos Modernos. (Sculpture in the Expanded Field. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths) Alianza, Madrid, 1996, pp.289-303.
[21] Ibid, p. 289.
[22] BARRO, D. Imágenes [pictures] para una Representación Contemporánea. (Images [Pictures] for Contemporary Representation) Mímesis-Multimedia, Oporto, 2003, p. 94.
[23] BREA, J. L. Op. cit., p. 136.
[24] VANDER WEG, K. “Conceptos Opuestos. Una Conversación con José Manuel Ciria”. (States of Opposition. A Conversation with José Manuel Ciria) Ciria. Conceptos opuestos. (States of Opposition) 2001-2011. IVAM Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Valencia, 2001, p. 23. (IVAM Valencia Institute of Modern Art)
[25] CIRIA, J. M. Alasdurasyalasmaduras. (Hard Wings and Mature Wings) Annta Gallery, Madrid, May 2009, p. 24.
[26] CUETO, Magdalena and MARFUL, Inés. “Textualidad de la Imagen e Imaginería del Texto”. Los Paisajes del Texto. (The Text in the Image and Imagining the Text. Landscapes of the Text.) Palacio de Revillagigedo, Gijón, 1992.
[27] TOWERDAWN, Joseph: “Plástica y Semántica (Conversaciones con José Manuel Ciria)”. (Form and Semantics [Conversations with José Manuel Ciria]). Quis custodiet pisos custodes. Galería Salvador Díaz, Madrid, 2000, p. 43.
[28] REYES, Graciela. El Abecé de la Pragmática, Arco Libros, Madrid, 2007, p. 7. (The ABC of Practical Linguistics)
[29] CIRIA, J.M.: “Espacio y Luz (Analítica Estructural a Nivel de Medio)”. (Space and Light [Structural Analysis of Media]) José Manuel Ciria. Espace et Lumiére. (Space and Light) Artim Galería, Strasbourg, 2000, p. 56.
[30] In comparison with the so-called empty words, whose meaning is only grammatical, within the ancient distinction still found in Chinese traditional grammar. Cfr. LYONS, John. Semántica Lingüística. Una Introducción, (Linguist Semantics: An Introduction) Paidós, Barcelona, 1997, pp. 93-98.
[31] GARCÍA BERRIO, A. and REPLINGER, M. Op. cit., p. 79
[32] KUSPIT, D. Signos de Pisque en el Arte Moderno y Posmoderno. (Signs of Psyche in Modern and Postmodern Art) Akal, Madrid, 2003, p. 134.
[33] POZUELO, A. “El Sueño del Constructor”. (The Builder’s Dream) José Manuel Ciria. Sueños Construidos. (Constructed Dreams). Galería Estiarte, Madrid, January-March 2004, p. 24.
[34] SOLANA, G. “El Monstruo en su Laberinto”. («The Monster in his Labyrinth») José Manuel Ciria. Teatro del Minotauro, (Theater of the Minotaur) Consorcio de Museos de la Comunidad Valenciana, and CAM, Alicante, 2003, p. 33.
[35] SOLANA, G. “Marsias o el Cuerpo Desollado de la Pintura”. («Marsyas and the Skinned Body of Painting») Ciria. Immanent Visions. Sala Rekalde, Bilbao, December 2001, p. 23.
[36] LACAN, J. Los Cuatro Principios Fundamentales del Psicoanálisis: Seminario XI. (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: Seminar XI) Barral, Barcelona, 1977, p. 108.
[37] HONTORIA, J. “Intersticios: Realidades Subyacentes”. («Interstices: Underlying Realities») José Manuel Ciria. Teatro del Minotauro, Op. cit, pp. 127-128.
[38] REPLINGER, M.: “Líquid Words”. De profundis clamo ad te aqua, Museo de Bellas Artes de Asturias, (Museum of Fine Arts of Asturias) March-April 2003, p.15
[39] Various theorists have reflected with great lucidity on the discourse concerning the possibilities for painting Ciria considered in this work. We are highlighting here the interpretation offered by Mercedes Replinger in the text of the previous citation, as well as the analysis developed in ABAD VIDAL, J. C. Ciria. Pintura sin Héroe, (Painting without Heroes) Tf Editores, Madrid, 2003, pp. 96-102.
[40] For a thorough analysis of rhetoric in the visual arts, see GARCÍA BERRIO, A. and HERNÁNDEZ, T. Ut poesis pictura. Poética del Arte Vsual. (Poetic Vision of Visual Art) Tecnos, Madrid, 1988. The abstract work of José Manuel Ciria in the ’90s has been analyzed based on this rhetoric methodology model in GARCÍA BERRIO, A. and REPLINGER MERCEDES, Op. cit.
[41] TOLOSA, J.L. Cambio Semántico del Módulo para su Utilización en una Práctica Pictórica. (Semantic Change of the Module for Use in Painting) Editorial service of the Universidad del País Vasco, Bilbao, 2002.
[42] GARCÍA BERRIO, A. and REPLINGER, M. Op. cit., p. 23
[43] AMOUNT, J. El Rostro en el Cine, (The Face in Cinema) Paidós, Barcelona, 1998, p. 103.
[44] FRANCBLIN, C. “Entrevista con Jean Baudrillard: La Comedia del Arte”. (Interview Jean Baudrillard: The Comedy of Art.) Lápiz, nº 187-188, November-December, p. 39.