Present Absence | Juan Carlos Ledezma
Absence implies the invisible, the unheard and the unfelt, yet it is sensed as present in the abstract works of Emilia Azcárate and José Gabriel Fernández. Both artists subject form to an emphatic reduction and deport modulated color to focus on the solid obstinacy of white or black. They nonetheless engage abstraction as a limit case of representation. Their works induce us to picture the presence of the body in the light of its absence and to visualize that absence as yet another mode of embodiment.
It is a homoerotic presence that against the grain of abstraction edges its way into the volumes of Fernández. These bare masses of unrelieved white assert no other existence than their own in space, but they figure forth fleshly fragments as their sides meet at ridges that protrude and recede while curving: the arch of a glans or the pull of a frenulum, for instance, faintly graspable in what otherwise retains the literal condition of a freestanding bulk.
It is the mark of these works that object and allusion do not register at once. We are either drawn to the perception of a body or withdrawn from it as we apprehend the literalness of shape, and so that the body’s putative presence is never fixed under a commanding gaze. It keeps sliding over to absence; it is proffered from one work to the next as a wholly elusive incarnation. Instead of confronting a body, we are faced with moments of embodiment punctuated by the continual emergence of abstract form.
Equally manifesting that which they withhold, Azcárate’s all-but-black paintings also assert absence to evoke a suspended presence. They do so through writing: their blackness bars light, but makes it present as a word which the artist has written in line with a geometric alphabet of her devising. Excluding light as a phenomenal fact to include it as a written notion, these paintings refute the visual immediacy of form while adopting the legible unfolding of text.
The paintings also bear an oblique reference to corporeality, following as they do upon a series of works in which Azcárate established a connection between the mixture of the primary colors and the intermixing of the three races that made up Hispanic America's mestizo body. That series found its most poignant expression in a folding screen where black—the result of commingling the whole range of chromatic hues—instantiated both the mixture of all colors and the intermixing of all races. Perceiving themselves dimly reflected against the acrylic sheets that covered the screen, viewers attained to a discernment of themselves as newly identified bodies inasmuch as the blackness that engulfed their reflections made their racial personae lose distinctiveness and opened them up to a ground of commonality.
The new series probes into light as signifier and concept. Providing the support for the inscription of the word “light” in different languages transliterated into the artist’s own alphabet, these paintings share in the legacy offered by the linguistic turn of much conceptual art. But light is also the physical condition for the visual manifestation of corporeality, and its absence from these works—an absence remarked upon by its presence as a word—might then be read in connection with the emphasis made by the previous series on how color inflected Hispanic bodies. Thus understood, the intricacy of chromatic mixtures in these paintings might be said to confound the legibility of both color and race. Complex modulations of blackness such as the ones found here might be therefore considered another way for the artist to critically engage the separation of bodies according to the clear delimitation of color as proposed by eighteenth-century racial discourse.
The artist’s work is complex and other readings may overlap with the one provided here, but either approached in precise historical terms or read as a meditation on light as the vehicle for form’s concretion, these works propose what might be called a procedure of de-differentiation. They obstruct the transparent legibility of chromatic differences and thus hinder the clear emergence of shapes. They propose that such an emergence be a continuous process untethered from established identifications. It is those demands that Azcárate’s work resists as it states the presence of light in and because of its absence. Fernández, on the other hand, approaches the homoerotic body through a similar tactic of postponement as his sculpture undoes the corporeality it insists on calling forth. Drawing a contrapuntal connection between abstraction and either lived or historical experience, the works of both artists thus propose what in loosely Derridean terms could be described as a mode of deferred embodiment. They touch on a moment in which sheer form proffers the presence of what it declares absent to allow such presence to be reshaped anew and otherwise, outside and against the persistence of established history or codified experience.
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