The Life of Monochrome
Between Kazimir Malevich's White on White (1918) and Willem dDe Kooning's drawing erased by Rauschenberg in 1953, a long time has elapsed. Contexts are different and there are marked conceptual differences between these works. However, they both have visual similarities and can be read as precedents for contemporary monochromes. Reducing color to its minimum expression, transgressing the aura of the author and of his hand, overthrowing the legitimization instances of the art system or showing that art is nominative, denying and affirming matter at the same time; all these ideas surround the “monochrome spectrum.”
In Argentina, the avant-garde movements of the 1940s (Concrete Art, Madí and Perceptism) set the precedent for a reductive art that proposed what was known as the “white function”: the emptiness of the image, only that which is produced by the very matter covering the medium, the plane. An art of “invention,” far from any representational desire, that is, an art of illusion of reality. This is what they proclaimed in the historic Manifiesto invencionista (Inventionist Manifesto) of 1946.
Since the early 1970s, Horacio Zabala (Buenos Aires, 1943) has been producing monochromes with a dual purpose. Partly, as a reduction of the object to a single color, but also as a kind of “effective symbol” that has a history within art history and, in turn, is filled with various connotations and narratives that the modernist orthodoxy would have labeled as spurious. This, in Latin America.
In Zabala’s work, monochrome is both a plane that blocks the vision, and that hides it by showing, as well as and a synthesis of words, objects, sensations and perceptions. Thus, around 1970, his maps with a large black square shadowing the conflictive areas of South America point to the unresolved. In other works of the same period, graphite on newspapers hinted at the blatant news of wars, dictatorships, and environmental battles to be lost. Undoubtedly, these works denote the political character that monochrome can embrace.
A visual artist and architect, and an emblematic member of the Group of 13, Zabala launched, exactly 50 years ago, his Anteproyectos (Drafts) exhibition where, among other ideas, he enunciated the concept of an architecture that highlighted the repression in contemporary society: prisons. At that time of political turmoil, Argentina, 1973, the proposal was irreverent and provocative. Zabala's prisons are for artists, those beings whose subversion is precisely that of their freedom. But are they really free? “Art is a prison” is one of the artist's first hypotheses. “Why would art be a prison?,” we wonder. “Because of the rules to which it subjects artists and matter? Because of the canons it establishes and, indolently and promptly, discards?” The truth is that, from its beginnings, and linked to sympathetic magic or religion, art was a system, and the prison metaphor suits it.
“Art as a prison” is a personal metaphor for the artist's inalienable will to shape matter,[1] whatever it may be –“reality” in the case of Zabala–, and to reflect on art while making art,[2] like any self-respecting conceptual artist. Art is “the world for the second time”, as defined in his 1998 book.[3] It is a different view, a rediscovery of what is already known. “The work of art opens up a game between art and the world,” Zabala says. Artist and theorist, Zabala’s life experiences –the dictatorship in Argentina, his exile, his work as an architect on a humanitarian mission in Africa,[4] the 2001 crisis, the financial default that shook the country shortly after his return to Buenos Aires– resulted in works that evoke these painful social processes.
Homeless families living in shelters built with the discarded packaging of those who could still consume, shelters for the economic and environmental catastrophe, and his usual prisons are taken up by Zabala in his role of an architect of contemporary dystopia. His urbanist gaze cannot ignore the evidence of the Anthropocene, its atrocious consequences on the planet and the social inequalities it entails.
His “Aislamientos” (isolations) work of 2017, an intervention with monochromes printed on black and white photographs, reserve and preserve certain spaces of the urban landscape; a desolate landscape –a silent nuclear hecatomb?– that exudes melancholy. Rather than signs, these portions of street space occupied by the monochrome resemble the most precarious solution to the need for shelter.
Currently, colorful monochromes are installed in his prison projects. These clear, sensitive and velvety planes, resolved in a glazed paper collage, are a contemplation “haven” within the synthetic cubicle of a cell. Evidently, the metaphor is not the same as in 1973. Prisoners look, partly interested, partly indolent, at the colored space they got. Perhaps their indifference attest to the discredit of art as an agent of social change. The monochrome encrypts that vertiginous aestheticization of the world that is a evident every day. daily. evidence.
By 2010, monochromes became hypotheses. For With both mathematical and linguistic thought, hypotheses are statements based on assumptions that require research in order to be verified. “Art does not produce certainties, but rather intuitions,” Zabala seems to be telling us. Brackets include and enclose geometric shapes. Addition or subtraction signs link monochromes. These hypotheses are a closed universe, with no apparent legible result. They are an example of the limits of languages, though not of the language of vision. They are abstract visual poetry, a genre that the artist has practiced since his beginnings. The hypotheses form a plastic ensemble whose poetry of signs refuses to reveal its enigma. Zabala piques our interest with the beauty of scientific writing and, in cases such as Anteproyecto de Hipótesis VI [sobre Vetas de Maderas] (Draft Hypothesis VI [on Wood Grain]), 2023, he gives us a glimpse of an imaginary formula that incisively points out to the undeniable destruction of the planet's forests.
In turn, in with “mathematical-geometric writings,” 2023, the designs become more complex. The signs seem tiny ideograms, painstakingly drawn with colored pencil; like an indecipherable modern codex that recovers handicraft, a space of action and thought that Zabala always valued.
The monochromes on drawings that he designs in 2020, the year of the pandemic, recall the stamps he obsessively used in the 1970s, to censor with no reason, as a parody of dictatorial practices. These stamped, transparent, monochromes confirm the validity of the plane, of the bidimensionality of painting; the reflection on the practice itself.
The purity of the monochrome no longer exists. Neither for its intention of being the contemplation of emptiness nor for the evidence of the unreality of the image. Its value shifts to proving its efficacy in fields where it can point to its context. This, of course, reaffirms its conceptual character.
“Purity is in the mixture,” Zabala declares, quoting the poet Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio. Among the various materials the artist experimented with for creating his monochromes (graphite on paper and leather, lithographs, enamel on wood, etc.), adobe, a mixture of earth and mud, was chosen in 2014. A monochrome as simple and sophisticated as this construction technique, one of the oldest in humanity, which is still used in various parts of the world, including Africa, where Zabala built shelters for the victims of ethnic wars.
“Purity is in the mixture: its originality (authenticity) lies in its proximity to the origin,” Zabala pointed out.[5] The Adam from the Bible, the first human, and the legendary Golem, they both emerged from mud, like the adobe monochrome which, in the context of the exhibition it was designed for,[6] symbolized the union of two traditions: the European, in the history of the French where the exhibition took place; and the native, with the mention of its mud houses. That “mixture” is what gave birth to the Argentine nation at the end of the 19th century.
Moving between the various parameters established by the mixture of languages, races, and experiences is an imperative of contemporaneity. Art creates worlds and, as Zabala points out; if those worlds are pure it is because they base their existence on the mixture of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary.
The presence of monochrome highlights the edges, the margins –either conceptual or physical–, as a field of meaning. It is there that it directs our gaze so it can delve, either bewildered or fascinated, into the beauty of the idea.
“Purity is in the mix.” The motto that Zabala takes up as his own enables us to value that which constitutes us as human beings, as social beings; to think that every day the non-negotiable individuality can be a paradoxically binding factor, integrating that which is foreign, different. At least it can be so in the field of art, that symbolic world that gives a second chance to the real.
María José Herrera
Buenos Aires, August 2023
[1]On this concept, I am following Luigi Pareyson and his Estetica: teoria della formatività, Torino, Edizioni di “Filosofia”, 1954.
[2]Filiberto Menna defines self-referentiality as a key feature of conceptual art. See, La opción analítica en el arte moderno.
[3] Horacio Zabala, El arte o el mundo por segunda vez, Rosario, Universidad Nacional de Rosario, 1998.
[4] Zabala built houses for refugees from the ethnic war in Kenya in the 1980s.
[5]Horacio Zabala, La pureza está en la mezcla, exh. cat., Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat’s Art Collection and Phoenix Art Museum, Buenos Aires/Phoenix, 2016 p. 12.
[6]The Escenas del 1900 (Scenes from the 1900s) exhibition (Tigre Art Museum, 2014, curated by María José Herrera) describes the modernity at the beginning of the 20th century, in the city of Tigre, which was the result of the “mix” of Argentine culture and the influence of the large-scale European immigration.
@font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1107305727 0 0 415 0;}@font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1073743103 0 0 415 0;}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin-top:0in; margin-right:0in; margin-bottom:10.0pt; margin-left:0in; line-height:105%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Cambria",serif; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-bidi-font-family:Cambria; mso-ansi-language:EN;}span.msoIns {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-style-name:""; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single; color:teal;}span.msoDel {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-style-name:""; text-decoration:line-through; color:red;}.MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:11.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Cambria",serif; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-bidi-font-family:Cambria; mso-ansi-language:EN;}.MsoPapDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; margin-bottom:10.0pt; line-height:105%;}div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;}