“El espacio-signo en el origen de la representación”, en Yturralde. Postludios, Centro de Arte de Caja Burgos, Burgos, 2005, pp. 4-8. ISBN: 84-96421-09-0.
The sign-space at the onset of representation
Víctor del Río
In 1996 Yturralde exhibited for the first time the graph paper sketches which gave way to his 1970s impossible figures. On a frailer format and marked by time, those drawings displayed an unprecedented perspective. Yturralde himself referred to the imperfection of the sketches when compared to the impeccable finish of his larger-format works. In his answer to a question from Daniel Giralt-Miracle in his Valencia studio, he said: “Yes, I’m also working on the imperfection idea” 1 . His comment seems contradictory in an artist whose works are defined by apparent formalisms and an obvious concern with accuracy.
The weft of the graph paper was like a mesh which held a reading sequence in the development of his figures. The prefabricated paper background was presented as a space of rational and abstract coordinates that was yet broken by the impossibility of the very figures. Yturralde delved into the link between the bi-dimensional periphery of the drawing space and its centre, and in the irresolvable representation of space.
Indeed, a recurrent element in Yturralde's works is the search for centrifugal and centripetal developments in the construction of the pictorial space. Daniel Giralt-Mirácle confirmed this hypothesis when he referred to the exhibition held at IVAM in 1999: «While his "Figures, Structures and Macles" were eminently centrifugal and expansive, these paintings promote a centripetal effect, making us part of another space, in an N dimension which he had never reached in previous works» 2 . In this model, the "space" lies in a totally different place from a purely visible space or the perspective issue, regardless of the fact this may be a condition of possibility for the analysis. The spatiality type analysed here is one with a discursive order; it pre-represents a subtle stage of connection between symbolic and spatial thinking. This search for the sign-space would allow us to understand the evolution of his work.
One of the most interesting points in the bi-dimensional space issue in modern tradition is the link of that surface with a conceptual, almost linguistic topology that operates as a sign of spatiality. His impossible architectures, crystallographic models, dia-grammatical layouts and constructions, and the abstraction of the space and scale experience take place in that context. In this respect, the histories of art told from clearly anti-formalist discourses, particularly in the American context, are not really satisfactory when trying to analyse the roots of conceptual models in the 1970 art scene.
It is not really the form question that is at stake, as one might think if you read the literature and the recently told art histories, but a space representation case from a perspective that has been voided of visual coordinates in order to condense space concepts. In that region -more conceptual than formal- the painting becomes the opposite of a stage, of the space-time anecdote, to unfold the analysis that lies in the origin of 20th century transformations. The re-arrangement of the painting space -the privileged representation place- is confirmed as the decisive battlefield of modern art. In fact, it is the very concept of representation as a space associated to modern thought which is systematically dismantled in that period.In the interstice between the visual and the symbolic, artists like Yturralde work on the need to inscribe all abstract thinking. When Manuel Muñoz Ibáñez wonders about the hyper-sensitive nature of space in Yturralde's “Interludes”, he refers to the relationship of such space with the inscription phenomenon: “What actually exists in space? What minimum variation alters the whole in a significant way?" 3 Logic or mathematical deductions deploy in their symbolic writing, and that in turn establishes its own connectivity nodes as a construct sustained in the specific space of abstraction. There, structures stay in the suspension of their relative, inter-dependent links. The suspension of such structures could be interpreted as some type of void, but in actual fact it is a possibility condition for space itself.
This aspect in Yturralde’s works was lucidly advanced by Román de la Calle in 1993 when he wrote: «At the end of the day, all structures -in being plastically embodied- break through the tetra-dimensional game and take it up under their own responsibility. And, the other way round, those very space-time coordinates –if they go beyond their conceptual abstraction- also need to be empirically anchored into the specific genesis of forms, thus becoming an unavoidable condition for their possibility» 4
Without a doubt, Yturralde’s spatial conception, together with his systematic research on cognitive and perceptive aspects in the genesis of representation, give his works a clearly conceptual orientation. However, it is precisely in the distance he sets from conceptual practices -in their tautological or linguistic perspective- where the differences in the inclusion of the scientific discourse become especially revealing. The tradition in the development of a symbolic space shows very different nuances based on the relationship with the medium and formalisation. In this respect, some experiences of the linguistic conception have approached –more or less literally- the spatial condition of algebraic or numerical constructions. This is the case with Bernar Venet and his representations of mathematical functions, Hanne Darvoben and her long numerical series, or Agnes Denes and her formal logic syllogisms deployed like the drawings of thought. In all these artists, the use of works on paper or media associated to the very practice of abstract thinking does not avoid a strict sense of the visual and plastic dimension of space. In some cases, as suggested by Gillo Dorfles, an aesthetization of that space can be sensed.
«The vagueness, polysemy, and metaphoric and metonymic component which, from Aristotle to Vico, from Richards to Epson, constitutes one of the surest attributes of literary, poetic, and artistic language in general cannot be ruled out all of a sudden to please an uncertain expressive modality. It would be tremendously sad to discover that the artisticity of Venet's paintings (or Darboven's figure series, or Kosuth's dictionary pages) lies in their cryptic nature (and not in their rationality!) and that, by admiring and praising them, we position ourselves in a situation similar to that of those Australian savages who worshiped the plane that landed on a mountain thinking it was a magic bird or a fallen God, ignoring its true technical features. Unfortunately, the critics try to justify works like Venet’s (which by the way are not really his works but excerpts from scientific manuals, or, to put it bluntly, lectures that Venet turns into sheer rambling in front of unlearned and ignorant audiences), calling on his rationality and semantic absolute, without realising that what actually makes them "attractive" and embarrassing is their "de-conceptualisation", their ‘filling up’ with meanings different from those that the artist –perhaps sincerely- would like them to have» 5
Despite its general hostility to such works, Dorfles’ argument also includes a lucid version of the facts. The aesthetization –which is not free from fetishism in the relationship of conceptual art with scientific objects- turns into an even more radical artistic problem which somehow queries a great deal of paradoxes and antagonisms in recent literary criticism. The evolution of the most representative artists of the linguistic conceptual evidences the gradual 'solidification' of the medium towards objectuality. Over time, the vector pointing to a shift “from object art to concept art” -so effective a way to understand the 1970s art practices- reversed. 6
As to the art projects related with this abstraction of space, a deep painting tradition reconstructs a translation of the logic and abstract thinking problem into a model of construction of the pictorial space. José María Yturralde’s interest in the genesis of that space inside the plane and the origin of representation is reinforced by his extensive research. Yturralde’s stay at the Center of Advanced Visual Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975 is already an unavoidable reference in the literature about the artist. In this regard, the development of his impossible figures and other studies undertaken later could be interpreted as being part of the same project.
The importance of this biographical and intellectual period in Yturralde’s art should not be played down in view of the subsequent evolution of his works. Without a doubt, we must keep in mind the interpretation of the sign-space as a place beyond the pictorial but as something which takes place in that realm. The place of the impossible figures is the place of signs, the inaccessible space, only apparently void of experimentation. In the analysis of Escher’s world as a genuinely transformed space 7Yturralde shows once again his interest in the ‘unfinishable’ reconstruction of representation as impossible or unfeasible space, ontologically constrained within representation, whose sole possibility does not only take place in abstraction but is generated as mental space. The dialogue with the material effectiveness of such figures and our perception of them leads him to build his kite series, a part of his work little studied but possibly one of the most interesting. His proposals about the physical space operate like models or sign machines whose inscription conditions alter spatial circumstances, cancelling the anecdotic level beyond themselves. The sky appears as a neutral background with impeccable cut-out kites sort of suspended on the geometric archetype.
In his “prelude” and "eclipse" series, we are faced with the need to reinterpret painting beyond the game of depth where magic exercises take place. Their very organisation reissues the relationship between centre and periphery with new approaches, adjusting the works' inner stress further. In “Eclipses”, the veiling of the centre as a blocked space gives way to the displacement of energy from the plane in a reversibility game, as the impossible mechanisms of the first figures did with respect of the gaze. From the need to be supported by figures (however abstract they might be) to the total dimension of the art piece in its relationship with the spectator-inclusion space, there is a progress which is soon seen in Yturralde's artistic discourse. The reversibility effect between the centre and the periphery of the pictorial space offers him an autonomy premise which ensures the reiteration of a sign-space, a neat and independent signifier. The start of continuity and self-understanding under this perspective is made clear when he states (1990): «I understand that the visual memory these paintings make up is a logical part of the evolution of those fluctuating forms –from the somehow representative paradoxical soundness- of the “impossible figures” that emerged from spatial networks of a secret multidimensional homing instinct; they did not become a painting until today, when the plane and a more poetic yet highly accurate (I wish) attitude were recovered» 8
Throughout Yturralde’s career we find tension between the medium as an instrumental intermediary and the search for a discourse able to transcend the work of art in a meaning project connected to the poetic and sublime. The hidden language of the sublime would deliberately appear blocked and reduced to the systematization of the signifiers -perfect and hermetic-, as if the dark meaning of poetry concealed by those pictorial spaces escaped from its own representation attempt. Right in that tension is the permanent concern with technique, which dates back to his 1968 research at the Calculus Centre of Madrid University, his 1969 computer works, or the work developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975.
His new poetic sensitivity, referred to in a great deal of papers about his work in the 1990s 9 is complemented by his diaries, where innumerable referents unfold which encourage that impression in critics and historians. In his “Postludes”, Yturralde himself advanced this idea about his own work: "This work of art is based –through colour- on the pulsing matter metaphor, on the almost perpetual processes of an infinite spiral, like life imposes upon entropy, where some room should be made for the concepts of the ineffable, the sublime, and the absolute in painting…” 10
However, the systemic coherence of his works, agreed upon a long-run programme, could remain latent under the semantic ‘recharge’ incorporated by such concepts. The sign-space continues operating like a capacitor in an impeccable coherence. The need to refer to the issues invoked by Yturralde himself as sources of a productive need is sanctioned by the striking tendency of both critics and historians to describe the evolution of his works in biographical terms. Juan Manuel Bonet 11Daniel Giralt-Miracle, or Carlos Catalán 12and many others too, arouse in their assays on the artist's works what seems to be a declaration of the artist's interests and concerns, in turn reinforced by the publishing of his writings in the form of a diary following the retrospective exhibition at IVAM in 1999 13 This invokes a non-immanent universe other than that of the works which seems to provide the discourse with symbolic, lyrical, or religious contents. The rich fabric of cultural suggestions, with special incidence on musical referents, entails a new connotation which is ‘shelled’ by Yturralde without rhetoric. As the artist says: «It is difficult to find a meaning in the works and actions we constantly strive for in this world, from our frailty; we are not able to understand neither the end nor the beginning or the occurrences in our lives» 14
Inevitably, the fate of signs seems to be to signify, and so laconic signifiers get full of symbols. The careful construction of a parallel story consolidates an allegorical operation around the works that remind us of the work of art that Malevich placed around the black square in a white background, with ritual or funerary overtones beyond the formal condensation of a relationship between figure and background. José María Yturralde follows an evolution which draws one of the most suggestive and enriching conflicts from modern tradition. In the emptiness of the sign he hides a poetry as humble as precise, a vibration of the sublime reached without the mediation of rhetoric or megalomania. The sublime stems from the de-occupation of the sign. Even though abstraction seems to detach his works from the contextual and sociological problems that occupy today’s art iconography in a hegemonic way, his central topic remains a blind point between the need for and the contingency of representation. In his loyalty to the genesis of the pictorial sign -associated to the ‘scienticist’ premises which capitalised the utopian fruit of the avant-garde in former times, today his works remain inevitably open to the question about the meaning which has never betrayed his dependence on the medium. The stress and tension of his canvases continues being the necessary premise to create space, as the kites float vividly in the sky thanks to that same stress in other solidarity canvases that cooperate in the construction of regular polyhedrons on the sea.
9 También en las críticas a las exposiciones más recientes se consolida esta idea en artículos como los de Cereceda, Miguel, “Racionalismo místico”, ABC Cultural, Madrid, 3/4/2004; o Maderuelo, Javier, “Hacia el infinito”, El País, Babelia, 27/3/2004.
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