From catalog \u201cOver \/ Under the Raw\u201d. Kornfeld Gallery, Berlin. Noviembre 2013.<\/p>\n
David Anfam<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n There will be time, there will be time \u2014T.S. Eliot<\/p>\n Like all languages, works of art involve codes. Sometimes we choose to unlock them outright. For example, when a viewer steps back from one of Claude Monet\u2019s Nymph\u00e9as paintings to realize that the thickly clotted brush marks are ciphers that, viewed at the right distance, become flowers, rippling water and so forth. This is one way we respond to the creative process that E. H. Gombrich in his landmark survey, The Story of Art (1950), described as \u201cmatching and making\u201d\u2014a progressive refinement by Western artists of the pictorial schemata used to achieve a representation of reality. At other times, the codes seem more cryptic or arbitrary, as in \u201canalytical\u201d Cubism, where a linear scroll shape becomes a convention that stands for a violin. Going still further, the play between signifier and signified can turn altogether ambiguous or opaque. Think of Francis Bacon\u2019s brutally smeared impasto facture and Jackson\u2019s Pollock\u2019s skeins of enamel paint. Are they figurative shapes manqu\u00e9, symbols or just material entities unto themselves? The answer is they may be all or none of these things insofar as they possess no inherent \u201cmeaning\u201d; instead, what they denote hinges upon their context and the interrelationships between the signs. This precept has been in debate ever since the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) argued that the structural connections, notably the differences, between terms generate signification. In a nutshell, the word \u201cgood\u201d has no meaning without \u201cbad\u201d. Such binary oppositions structure Jos\u00e9 Ciria\u2019s art.<\/p>\n The notion of binary oppositions may at first suggest simple polarities, an either\/or situation. The twist is that nothing looks further from this cut-and-dried antithetical scenario than Ciria\u2019s complexities, in which the very terms that he orchestrates, let alone their colloquy, are shifting, ambivalent and paradoxical. Rather than either\/or choices, his progressions are more like\u2014to recall Dore Ashton\u2019s neat phrase for Philip Guston\u2019s alternations between abstraction and representation\u2014a \u201cyes\/but\u2026\u201d momentum. The visual lexicon circles back on itself in permutations that change even as it remains the same. Moreover, at the root of codes stands a disjunction. Namely, that a code\u2019s superficies are objective, regular and impersonal (letters, numbers, gestures, etcetera), whereas the content that is encoded often tends, almost by definition, to be subjective, charged and personal. Otherwise, what is the point of resorting to any code?<\/p>\n Thus, the monotonous tables of letters generated by the wartime Enigma machine held secrets that boded existential matters of life and death. Ciria\u2019s theories and even his work have a touch of this polarization. Like the ciphers of a code, they appear obsessive and repetitious, a secondary revision of less orderly initial material. We intuit this aspect from the tone of, say, a single sentence in the artist\u2019s observation about his recent output: \u201cLetting the series unfold in three blocks of works, like a kind of polynomial with three discursive possibilities as a first round in my hungry return to abstraction.\u201d A single word, \u201chungry,\u201d latent with overtones of desire and urges, speaks volumes. Encoded into Ciria\u2019s cool xonomysystems is a strongly emotional life world.<\/p>\n Even before Ciria left his spacious Manhattan studio on La Guardia Place in 2012 to return to Madrid, his imagery had grown darker. This shift occurred especially in his Rorschach Heads series from 2009 onwards. Although Ciria had featured \u201cheads\u201d before\u2014sporadically and as early as 2000, then again in 2005\u2014the Rorschach ones were unprecedentedly alarming. Indeed, the art historian and psychoanalyst Donald Kuspit has justifiably called these grimacing physiognomies \u201can abstract expression of anxiety\u2014a catastrophe of consciousness (1)\u201d. Underlying this change were personal circumstances that made the Heads into a work of mourning. To wit, Ciria\u2019s father died from a brain tumor in 2010\u2014an event that inevitably traumatized the artist\u2014and the previous year he had visited Easter Island and was struck by its monumental, watchful heads. Watching would become a leitmotif, while the motif of the head, the very seat of human thought and life, has grown inseparable from its nemesis, death. Relinquishing his New York studio three years later added a further melancholic weight. The installation, My Father\u2019s Jacket (2012) epitomized this burgeoning toll of distress and recollection. Successive shots of the Rorschach Heads are projected on an outsize black suit jacket. The resultant uncanny mise-en-sc\u00e8ne is reminiscent of the refrain that closes W.B. Yeats\u2019s poem, \u201cThe Apparitions\u201d (1939):<\/p>\n Because of the increasing Night The manner in which the Rorschach Heads metamorphose in this installation and throughout the series overall\u2014from mostly transfixed fright to the occasional grim grin\u2014conveys a powerful effect of psychic flux, as though watching were yoked to looking within the self. Here, historical forces also enter the equation.<\/p>\n 2009 was no ordinary year. It witnessed the global impact of the economic recession accompanied on an international scale with widespread social unrest. In returning to Madrid in 2012, Ciria was re-settling in a changed country from the one which he had left in 2005. No longer in a boom, Spain was (and still is) witnessing massive unemployment and frequent street demonstrations, an increasingly conservative climate in which social conflict between the forces of authority and those of protest were, as in Greece, exacerbated (indeed, even I myself recently had an ugly encounter in Madrid with the policia nacional). Such is the background to Ciria\u2019s recent works. When the motifs from the Rorschach Heads, which already resembled cut-outs, were literally excised to create props for the street actions in New York that Ciria photographed and titled Lost Identities (2012)\u2014in which people hold these artificial faces in front of them like masks\u2014Ciria perhaps came close to a kind of agitprop.<\/p>\n Yet we should not for a moment imagine that Ciria is a latter-day Edvard Munch or William de Kooning, let alone a Madrile\u00f1o version of Georg Grosz. Perish the thought. On the contrary, he is a deeply conceptual creator, alert to the semiotic components\u2014among them lines, grids, planes, gestural techniques and the chromatic spectrum\u2014that constitute the building blocks of art. This is why the torpedo or jagged-angled presence that recurs throughout Ciria\u2019s paintings and especially the Masks of the Glance series does not perform as an unbridled gestural mark \u00e0 la de Kooning but, rather, connotes a disciplined painterly reconstruction of such expressionist swathes. Ciria likens them to a phosphene, \u201cthe light sensations that remain on the retina after one has looked into the light (2)\u201d. In order words, they are traces, residues. Why else is a 2011 series titled Abstract Memory? The reason is because it enacts, at one level, a retroactive meditation, a critique of abstraction. Traces and retroaction lead to the next novelty in Ciria\u2019s progression: photography.<\/p>\n As Susan Sontag and other cultural critics have frequently observed, photography is a melancholy medium. It freezes the past, turning what is absent into a presence that is, nevertheless, imbued with an aura of loss, life gone lifeless. Sontag explains the phenomenon thus: \u201cSuch images are indeed able to usurp reality because first of all a photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask (3)\u201d. Enter Ciria\u2019s next series, the Psychopomps\u2014begun in 2001 yet now expanded in their imagistic scope and no longer based on advertisements\u2014in which photography plays a key role.<\/p>\n In the Psychopomps oil painting overlays digital prints on canvas. Hence they are a species of collage, a method uniting different media in which the process of layering is fundamental. Some of the titles of the Masks of the Glance already presaged the atmosphere of the Psychopomps. Think of The Hole, Nine Windows, Narrow Days and I Hear Voices In My Head\u2014in short, abasement, vacancy, constriction and psychic fantasy. Likewise, the reign of King Ubu in at least three of the small La Guardia Place collages on cardboard of 2008\u2014an allusion to the titular anti-hero in Alfred Jarry\u2019s 1908 play of the same name\u2014signaled the rise of the absurd (the only kingdom over which Ubu presides is anarchy), the polymorphous (he is shaped like some cross between a man and a vegetable) and infantile impulses (bodily excretions abound in the play) in Ciria\u2019s stagecraft. The former speckles and wedges of luminescent orange-red in the two earlier series develop, in the Psychopomps, into violent painterly explosions that assail and obliterate the photographs under them.<\/p>\n The word \u201cpsychopomp\u201d gives the stately game away: it is the ancient Greek term for a spirit guide (daimon) of souls to\/through the underworld. We are in a modern inferno, its populace a parade of fashion models, hip hop musicians, belligerent Humvees and worse; one effaced soul, overwritten with the word \u201cMASK\u201d in blood red, has a suspiciously Adolf Hitler-ish haircut. True, as Kuspit has observed, the erotic remains a compelling dynamic even here\u2014in the seductive females, the breasts encircled with paint, the tongue that one lady thrusts out\u2014but it feels closer to a liebestod, for thanatos is surging from the depths to overwhelm eros. Yet if this is a troupe of the damned and damning faces of our time, it is also oddly formalized, a quality that lends it an uncanny cast, as if even the barbaric paintwork were an act of coolly premeditated iconoclasm. No wonder Kazimir Malevich holds a wobbly red square etched with black in front of his face, while an unruly motorbike\u2019s front wheel is fixed beneath a precise grid of phosphene-cum-gestural blotches, stasis imposed upon propulsion. Ciria has created a waxworks not just of people but also out of the mechanics of abstraction, which pivots upon erasure and displacement. To rephrase Harold Rosenberg\u2019s famous mythology of \u201caction\u201d painting: the figure goes, the brushstroke-as-constructed-event rules. Overall, we confront a red-hot but chilling masquerade\u2014James Ensor\u2019s serried masks updated through the theoretical knowledge gleaned from a century of abstraction. Carnival\u2019s riotousness, as it were, meets Lent\u2019s somber repentance.<\/p>\n Lastly, the Psychopomps\u2019 layered physical makeup sets the scene for Ciria\u2019s next working group: the wildly inventive, manic Puzzles, which are ongoing (all the collages belong to a wider taxonomy, Constructed Dreams). What had been a relatively straightforward technique in the Psychopomps waxes complex. The backgrounds of the Puzzles are comprised of Ciria\u2019s customary abstract paintings, now rendered on tarpaulin. Over this base stand collages made with a thick plastic medium, similar to that used for covering worn surfaces in bathrooms and kitchens. Then additional pieces of the plastic, treated as collage, together with some more painted spackling, complete the whole. The outcome is, well, deliberately\u2026 a puzzle. Puzzling because everything is so transitional and composite. In several Puzzles gridded strips form rudimentary color charts, as though some rickety demonstration in optics by Josef Albers were emerging from the formless. Elsewhere, discs, stripes and splashes\u2014shades of such non-objective precursors as the Delaunays, Kenneth Noland, Gene Davis and Jackson Pollock\u2014reconstitute themselves as single staring eyes, faceless heads, unquiet still lifes and cell-like organisms. We are witnesses to the birth of a very strange world, by turns antic, considered and savage (as, say, Joan Mir\u00f3\u2019s universe could be all at once). Faces are forming themselves, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot (see the epigraph to this essay), in order to more than return our gaze as we meet theirs. Morpheus has comingled with Cyclops. Most critically, the Puzzles take to an extreme an undercurrent that has longed haunted Ciria\u2019s universe and which has lately come to the fore. The impression is of a ubiquitous agon between what lies below and what surfaces above. Something \u201craw\u201d\u2014in the sociological (the violence that lurks beneath civilized norms), psychological (the subconscious that lurks in everyone) and material (the ground that lurks under all paintings) senses\u2014has been wrenched from underneath to preside\/(c)over the manifest surface. In the process, this rawness has become \u201ccooked,\u201d conditioned, refined and made hyper-sophisticated by the self-reflexive stratagems and artifices of Ciria\u2019s ceaselessly inventive art (4).<\/p>\n 4. The reference is of course to Claude L\u00e9vi-Strauss\u2019s distinction between nature and culture in The Raw and the Cooked, Mythologiques Vol. I, transl. John and Doreen Weightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press [1964], 1990), especially 28: \u201cThis is tantamount to saying that, within culture, singing or chanting [i.e. art] differs from the spoken language as culture differs from nature\u2026. Again, singing and musical instruments are often compared to masks; they are the acoustic equivalents of what actual masks represent on the plastic level.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From catalog \u201cOver \/ Under the Raw\u201d. Kornfeld Gallery, Berlin. Noviembre 2013. Masquerade David Anfam There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet \u2014T.S. Eliot Like all languages, works of art involve codes….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/joseciria.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8864"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/joseciria.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/joseciria.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/joseciria.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/joseciria.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8864"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/joseciria.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8864\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11222,"href":"http:\/\/joseciria.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8864\/revisions\/11222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/joseciria.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nTo prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet<\/p>\n
\nThat opens her mystery and fright.
\nFifteen apparitions have I seen;
\nThe worst a coat upon a coat-hanger.<\/p>\n\n
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