HORACIO ZABALA: REITERATIONS 

Opening reception Thursday May 31, 6-9 pm 

Exhibition runs until June 30.  

Tuesday to Saturday 11-6 pm.

Horacio Zabala: Cartographies, Duplications, Hypotheses

By Fernando Davis

Cartographies

The series of maps depicting Argentina or South America, started by Zabala in 1972, highlighted the conflictive and tumultuous sociopolitical period of the 1970s in Latin America, when the artist, as one of the thirteen founding members of the “Grupo de los Trece”, was working with the “Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC)” in Buenos Aires, where a selection of these works was shown as part of a solo exhibition titled “Anteproyectos” (First Drafts) in 1973.

The works, school maps, printed or drawn by the artist, were burnt, deformed, intervened, blocked out or obscured with the repetitive application of inked rubber stamps mirroring the heightened state of censorship and systematic use of violence prevalent in most South American countries at the time.

In the characteristic two-part process of removing and repositioning when working with “readymades” (ordinary manufactured objects that the artist selects and modifies transforming them into artworks), Zabala appropriates the standard symbols and conventions of drawn maps and replaces them in a new framework of semantic references. If the graphic representation of maps refers to a system that quantifies and charts the landscape, Zabala’s intervened maps work as a metaphor of the use of power and its effects on bodies and territories, an “anti-cartography” of sorts. As a result, the established cartographical order is disrupted calling attention to the violent Latin American situation of the early 70s.

Duplications

In 1984, while residing in Vienna, Zabala began a systematic practice that consisted of tracing entire pages from leading international periodicals, ranging from the front page to pages of the financial markets as well as the entertainment and comic sections. In each of the works, the artist follows the same procedure: mirroring bodies of text, photographs and charts from the printed newspaper pages onto sheets of tracing paper using lines and planes of color made with oil pastel. A series of these works, illustrating the artist’s views on the relationships between text and image, original and copy and repetition and deflection, was shown in Paris that same year in an exhibition titled “Duplications & Dédoublements”.

When transforming the text into an image, Zabala shifts the focus from the content of the original text to just the overall form or layout, where its meaning is now questionable. In this process, the so-called “transparency”, self professed by the mass media, is challenged by the artist. Zabala’s manipulation reveals an arbitrary act in the same way the general media manipulates information.

Zabala’s two-fold process deviates from the commonly accepted understanding of what is an original and what is a copy. In the comparison of the periodical’s page and its traced reproduction, the ‘duplications’ not only betray the fidelity of the original model, but at the same time question the relational causality between the original and its ‘copy’.

Normally, in the relationship between the original and the reproduction, the latter is deemed as a derivation  or deviation of the former. However, with Zabala’s intervention there is an inversion of roles. His ‘copy’ becomes the original, as it is unique, as opposed to the ‘original’ newspaper, which is actually a multiple and the result of mass production. Instead of switching the hierarchical order, the “Duplications” show that the copy precedes the model while in the process cementing its authority.

Hypotheses

In his “First Draft” drawings of the last few years, Zabala revisits a recurrent theme in his work, that of the codification of architectural symbols. Based on his works from the early 1970s, titled “Anteproyectos de Cárceles” (First Drafts of Jails), the artist creates a series of intriguing “Hypotheses” about art. In essence, these hypotheses are monochrome planes connected by punctuation signs and algebraic symbols that create impossible propositions and nonexistent mathematical equations.

Actually, the use of monochromes is found in Zabala’s earlier production. In 1974, the artist created a series, titled "Obstrucciones" (Obstructions), where maps were blocked out (canceled) with rectangular planes of black ink, connecting the neoavant-garde use of monochromes to the widespread presence of political violence and repression in the Latin American continent.

In his series "Hipótesis" (Hypotheses), Zabala imposes a visual conflict upon the monochromes by introducing, between the planes of color,

a series of signs that formulate a new system of semantic references. Zabala’s interventions draw a critical trajectory that attempts to be more of a theoretical investigation about art itself than a detailed study of the monochrome. The endless combinations of the elements (monochromes, punctuation signs and algebraic symbols) that make up these Hypotheses are but a mere indication of the myriad possibilities that still coexist in art today.

Horacio Zabala (Buenos Aires, 1943) is an artist and architect who lived in Europe between 1976 and 1998 before returning to Buenos Aires, where he currently resides and works. From 1972 to 1976, he was part of the “Grupo de los Trece,” formed as part of the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC). In 1975, together with Edgardo Antonio Vigo, he organized the “Last International Exhibition of Mail Art” at the Galería Arte Nuevo in Buenos Aires and a year later, while residing in Rome, proposed an international poll as well as a socio - aesthetic intervention aimed at artists, art historians and art critics under the banner “Hoy el Arte es una Cárcel” (Today Art is a Jail). In 1984, “Duplications & Dédoublements” was exhibited at Galerie Donguy in Paris. In 1997, Zabala concluded El arte o el mundo por segunda vez (Art or the World for the Second Time), an electronic interactive piece designed for the internet and produced for the Centre pour l’Image Contemporaine Saint-Gervais in Geneva. In 2007, he exhibited a retrospective of his work from the 1970s at Fundación Alon in Buenos Aires titled “Horacio Zabala. Anteproyectos (1972-1978)”. In the last few years, he has participated in “Subversive Practices. Art under Conditions of Political Repression: 60s – 80s / South America / Europe” – Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, 2009 and “Sistemas, Acciones y Procesos. 1965 - 1975” - Fundación PROA, Buenos Aires, 2011. He has authored "El arte o el mundo por segunda vez" (Rosario, UNR, 2000) and Vademecum para artistas (Buenos Aires, Asunto Impreso, 2009). His work is represented in the collections of Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires; Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de Sâo Paulo, Sao Paulo; Tate Modern, London; The University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; University of Essex Collection of Latin American Art, Essex; Daros Latinamerica, Zürich; Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO), Miami and Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA), Middlesbrough.