By Ana Vogelfang
How to encroach on the impeccable, pure, and pristine blank page? With the trace of what lies outside any organization or morality. Trash, smog, muck, grease, excrement, saliva, sputum, that stardust let off when cement wastes away—all of that is the filth of the street that rests and then settles on the page. This is not just any filth—it is the European variety.
Tomás moved from Buenos Aires to Frankfort, and when he walks from one point on the map to another—from his home to his studio, say—he gets lost and finds images. With each step the sole of his sneaker gathers micro-residue as his mind collects impressions that he stows away like tracks in his personal laby-rinth. He gets lost in the grid of an unknown city. He comes upon his mother a number of times each block—there she is, a sign of madness.
The city is the printing ink when the sole of his sneaker stomps on the paper. There is nothing special about this sole—it belongs to those sneakers that you buy and use until they are in tatters. These are the sneakers that look like those other sneakers, the ones under the table when on top of it there are pints of beer and passports brimming with seals.The state records fingerprints because they are always the same. They say the same thing about our body each time one of our fingers presses down on bureaucracy for its annals. The print of a sneaker, meanwhile, changes. It is determined by our current state. Walking into the studio and stomping on paper is a gesture that records who I am, who I am today: the sole is the same but the print is not. The organization of the filth we gather every time we go out varies; our steps are more or less firm, more or less listless, more or less determined. Sometimes the step is lighter. Sometimes our troubles carry more weight. And so any outing becomes a journey into our depths. Meanwhile, on the surface, Tomás casts a camera inside a bottle. The camera pivots back and forth between sky and ground. It films the tide. Tomás himself appears at the entrance to a train terminal—geographic hub of Europe and quarters of yuppies and zombies. In Germany, a plastic bottle is a bit of waste that can be traded for money at any supermarket. Think of it this way: one bottle is one empanada.
Tomás has little faith in his memory, and to see his thoughts he draws them. He uses paper like an Etch A Sketch, that toy from the eighties. At a certain point it would lose a bit of the magic of erasure and the fresh start. It would wear out from so many drawings until, even after they were erased, earlier images would appear like ghosts or watermarks or fissures of the past on the present. Just as time creases the skin’s surface as scars and wrinkles, the marks of the hard graphite work their way into the paper’s cellulose, rendering cracks. Tomás draws and erases and leaves and comes back. On each sheet he re-creates an outing. Amidst sudden silences are layers of disparate information: foot-prints, museums in flames, omissions, pop-culture personalities, the odd phrase, glazes. Is there anything he doesn’t draw? He scratches the paper and inhabits the surface until he has calmed down. He turns the page around and discovers a new horizon. He draws as if memory and drawing were the same substance, the same material. What tells him the end has come? Nothing—the drawings keep drawing themselves from time to time.
