The Painter as a Writer

(...) Theoretician, provocateur, art critic, author of forewords, narrator, thinker; the painter meets up, relates, and enters into dialogue, with his other – and contradictory other – egos. “I feel like a bus full of people fighting with each other,” he notes in the epilogue to Cuaderno de Bitácora [Logbook]. [1]

The manifesto-book that founds the birth of the painter Noé as a writer is Antiestética [Anti-Estethics]. Published in 1965, six years after his first solo show and barely less time after his involvement in the Nueva Figuración [New Figuration] movement, it begins with an ironic presentation: “I'm necessarily making a mistake in writing this book. I'm making a mistake because I'm speaking of abstract and collective issues in relation to a concrete and individual labor; I'm making a mistake because I'm speaking of a relation of cause and effect; I'm definitiely making a mistake because I'm a painter and I'm writing. For this reason, above all, I'm asking the reader at the outset to excuse me. This is a book about painting written by a painter. And, as we know, that's not something generally tolerable.” Noé alludes to the misunderstanding, confronts it, and so engages in a continual reflection on art which will seek to do battle with the dogmatic intentions of the phenomenon of art. 

The tool that will define his strategy, both pictorial and theoretical, is chaos. In the evolution of his thought-action, Noé tries out different approaches to the problem, pointing out, above all, the important task of grappling with it in our artistic, historic and social context. A political reading which, in its initial stages, risks constructing new values regarding a determined reality, “because it is a matter of the cultural process of rejecting one order and looking for another, and it is accordingly continuous, tortuous and open, with an alternation in it of chance and necessity, doubt and certainty, longing and prejudice.” Over time, chaos goes from being disorder or confusion to being “the order which becomes (…) vital order.” At present, Noé views it as “a dynamic – of which we've been a part – in permanent transformation.” If the artist is a man placed in his context, as he underscores in Antiestética, “in current society, skeptical of values yet at the same time thirsting for a future, to be that society's mirror, to reveal its image, it is not to show what that society is, but rather what it continues to want to be, and what it's wrecking.” At issue here is a critical reading of the creative process which shreds the notion of art as a result in order to center itself on art as research. A way of knowing, the aim of which is “to reveal what overwhelms us, what destroys the balance of the relation of the artist to what surrounds him, a surrounding that is forever in motion,” and which finds in chaos a poiesis, a way of doing and making. In disdaining the myth of the unity of the work in its formal aspect, and in its social function as the guarantee of a harmonious order that no longer exists, Noé posits a painting of structuring and therefore of rough, uncertain vision “which reflects the oppositions and contrasts of a chaotic world” and finds in the relations of tension and clash of the elements, precisely “chaos as structure.” 

In defending theory as an act of lucidity (“if creation is fundamentally a search, what matters more: a repetitive act on a canvas, or raising consciousness of what one wants to grasp?”), Noé is a painter who thinks, and thinks to and about himself in a continuous present. His critical discourse, marked constantly by paradoxes and simulacra of the painter's debate with himself, seems to suspend whatever requires a categorical definition of the world and things, to confirm that “an artist is a mobile discourse in history, never petrified.”