Celestes

 

And after the end, the footnote

My gallerist has suggested to me that I should perhaps give some explanation regarding Of tangent light, a group of works carried out between April 1999 and November 2001. This is fine by me, for although I am of the opinion that, for better or for worse, there is nothing more eloquent about a piece of work than the work itself, I do not have any sympathy for the mystique of autism.

Regarding the representation of the Vila Olímpica towers in Ready, steady, end, this has nothing at all to do with the events of the past September 11th in New York. The idea for this painting had been conceived since 27/9/00, as shown in one of the handwritten notes included in Mysterious event. It is true that I was in the process of painting it at the time of the New York incident, but the cityscape was already finished and I was actually concentrating my efforts on the flash in the sky when I heard something about a fire in the Twin Towers on the radio, turned on the T.V. and stayed glued to it for the rest of the day. However, this was nothing more than a coincidence, just as when a couple of years ago, whilst painting a portrait of my uncle the poet for a literary magazine, I learnt that he had just died: an unfortunate coincidence.

The Of tangent light group itself, should be seen more as an unitary work composed of different elements than as a series, like a rather short comic book with rather big drawings. It came about when a client commissioned me to do a large horizontal version of a painting of mine that he already owned and thus The disappearance was born. This painting was very soon to be followed by two more brothers. These first three paintings were not done in their proper turn within the series, but upon starting the fourth, there was already a patent progression towards unreality which fully manifested itself in the fifth painting, which I painted from a digital morphing of the previous one, done with the very necessary help of Diego Gil, my cousin, friend, excellent artist and Mac wizard. Not being in any way a purist, I enjoyed the slightly perverse use of an otherwise realistic language to smudge the boundaries between naturalistic and metaphysical painting, abstraction, photography and conceptualism, which, come to think of it, are merely different genres of fiction, much as love and action movies are to cinema.

The last work, Mysterious event, is a collage composed of all the graphic and photographic material used as a reference in the elaboration of the previous paintings. I was attracted by the notion of compressing the entire creative process for the series into a single image, an idea that had been with me since the very beginning. For this reason I have named it Mysterious event, whilst the first painting of the series is actually Mysterious event II. For it is simultaneously prologue and epilogue to the whole series, comprising everything, including itself (thanks again to the help of Diego Gil). Before and after compressed into an instant. I believe that in the mind, time does not really exist as such -that there is only a permanent present that encompasses both the past and the future. Reality is therefore that hazy place between memory and hypothesis. All the past and all the future exist now, eternity is this very moment.

I hope that my explanations have been of some use.

Gonzalo Goytisolo Gil