If One Were a Physicist… I Don’t Know If One Could Manage It
It occurs to me for a moment that, in order to write a text about these works by Guillermo Iuso (today happens to be his birthday), I would have to do it with my eyes closed, precisely in order to be able to see them. But closing my eyes is the same as looking at all the things that surround this computer; darkness is full of thoughts. To concentrate and see what I want to see in these works, I have to go fast. Writing is a way of observing with the fingers; writing quickly is concentrating on the things that interest me in what I see, which are no longer-things, but something I don’t know what they are, yet they feel like “things.”
To this act of writing I have to throw at it, just as one throws a steak onto a hot griddle, a small tip of an iceberg connected to a stimulus of Iuso’s work so that a new path opens. But it’s not easy to throw an imaginary steak on a griddle and have it start cooking. I mean, it’s imaginary because I have to imagine myself in the presence of something that is not here. But what is here and is not imagination, is the treasured sensation of what his works have produced in me. And that will be my steak.
Now I am going to close my eyes, and when I do, it will no longer be to avoid seeing other things that distract me from seeing, nor to imagine something, but rather to literally dive into the liquid medium of my sensations. Hold my breath, close my eyes, and sink. Every sensation needs a medium that can retain colors, etc., and the liquid seems to be the best. Because even if images seem airy, for me they are aquatic. The atmosphere contains water, the eyes are moist, the artist uses humidity to work with color, the brain is irrigated. So I am going to start diving… What I see is not a vision, it is the “vision” of the sensation of a vision. By seeing I mean being in the presence of, and within that presence. Now I can tell you… I see a green that shines, a rounded surface with small hills.
That makes the shine flicker unevenly—the surface I see measures… 6 x 2 cm and about 8 mm high. I ask myself why the first thing I see is a single color on such a small surface, when what I know of Iuso’s works is that they are full of colors and relatively large. Until I can take in more of this little sausage—because now it seems that instead of a steak it was a little sausage dropped on the griddle—I will not abandon it… The small surface is composed of tiny dots that switch on and off, but they are not made of light. They are like those animals or algae in the sea that have liquid light. These dots are not alive, or at least I do not perceive them as such. The green is a background that turns into yellowish dots and then back to green. This process happens very fast but, in this moment, I can focus on a toasted golden yellow dot that, when I look closely, becomes opaque. In relation to the green context it shines, but in itself it is, I would almost say, ochre. Then it disappears and leaves its absence marked for an instant in the green. Then the dot returns, but this time larger. It is a valley of about 10 cm, like those craters visible in photographs of the moon, although by color it would be more Mars. Toward the edges the dot has a kind of border, the center is more sunken but flat, smooth. Like a clean ceramic coffee saucer. And now it’s gone or—what happened? It became an incandescent green surface. It goes away fast but returns slowly. And it is already returning. My God! Will I ever get out of this dot? Until I can encompass more of this dot, I will not abandon it. I take great pleasure in observing how it unfolds, stretching to its maximum tension—which is greater in each appearance—only to fold back again. Now it is like pie dough baked in its pan, inviting me to rest my cheek on it, and upon doing so I no longer see it. I sense the tactile quality of the dot through strange, unknown sensations. I try to classify: warm, cold, soft, etc.—but there is no shape that corresponds to this sensation. For example, if I once said something about water, I would not say now that it felt wet. Everything is unknown… suddenly something happens in my cheek. Tiny “little pricks.” Pricks that subdivide into endless pricks that I cannot isolate when I attempt to. They do not stop; they multiply into an inexpressible sensation. Maybe I have reached something. Something that cannot be held, because it has no form and I cannot tell it.
A painting is a state of madness for comprehension. These paintings by Iuso fall into universes of infinite dots. How can one make something like this? If one were a physicist… I don’t know if one could manage it. How can one compose the infinite with relief-paint tubes bought in a store in Brazil? How can one be in the presence of something so enormous or so tiny, by looking at one dot of a little green sausage located on the far right of a dented car bumper? I could never answer these questions because to do so I would have to have been able to understand, in order to transmit, the limit-experience of the small—at this point I no longer know its size—dot. But what I do realize is that the works move between what we understand of what we experience and what we do not, and vice versa, all the time. If we stop that process in what is known, a work cannot expand, cannot come into being. So if I try to answer now the question of how it is possible… I say to myself: He can do it because somehow he does not know what he is doing. But this is not a merit, the artist has no choice. Someone like Iuso understands the impossibility of painting, and therefore, in order to “paint,” proposes to abandon his virtues, to unmake his skills. Very easy… How do we stop doing what we like, what we do well? Hmm? How do we abandon at each instant what was learned in the previous instant? Each artist is different because they make different decisions. Some invent their method, which, to be a method and to function, must not function. They choose the method that is particularly secret to themselves. Like in that story where one leaves breadcrumbs and must then become the little bird that follows behind eating them, in order to not remember what was done.
An anecdote
When I went to Iuso’s studio I asked myself: what is all this? And I told him: this is incredible, just to buy time while I tried to think what to say. I was astonished = speechless. Immediately I had an image of him painting, really of him casting paint onto those things which at first I did not understand what they were. I imagined him and remember him now, moving with his arms thrown back, leaning sideways, with his body swaying out of control. In one of his hands he had a tube of something and suddenly, at the least expected moment, without any particular passion, he would cast a little sausage! and keep walking… That was the image I needed to understand that nothing had to be defined, meaning I conveyed to myself that neither he knew what he was doing, nor what all of that was! And that neither of us would ever know. From that moment on, astonishment was our state.
I, Guillermo Iuso
The truth he chooses is not a confession in the middle of a conversation among friends: “oh yes, I choose my truth,” as a set of judgments that would allow one to free oneself from truth experienced as imposed. Above all, what Iuso does is a truth embodied in painting—the title of the exhibition is taken from one of his works. The truth he refers to is the intense truth of the instant, the necessary sensation of certainty and not a tool of intellectual verification. The truth he refers to does not belong to him either. It can only be itself in the specificity of the painting, and through his calligraphy the artist signs, taking responsibility for the action: I am the one who chooses it. The instant and intensity cannot be captured. But Iuso can create a pictorial instant that is a possibility for experiencing intensity, certainty. I think of ritual objects, those that make us collapse to our knees on the floor. They are objects that through their physical constitution act upon our being… and someone made them…
The truth I choose is a painted action and not a representation.
I, Guillermo Iuso, swear that this is the truth I choose. It is not a truth, it is all the intensity that truth contains. Suddenly I am invaded by a question: will this work survive the artist? What Guillermo Iuso is choosing when creating these pieces is another way of life, the intense one, not the one of duration. The one of mystery instead of narrative. The life that is all life—even the one that exceeds us—in the intense instant, in this case, of painting.
Fernanda Laguna, August 27, 2014
