English
The world presents itself to me with information that is disperse and varied. My incoherent coherence is that of trying to understand myself through it. That is why it is incoherent coherence. All my life I have taken in hand everything I could take in hand in order to do this, as if I were a “bricoleur” (person who practices “bricolage”, a term that Levi Strauss uses to characterize the thought of primitive mankind, which he places in opposition to the rational method pertaining to what he calls the “engineer”). If I am a painter it is because as a “bricoleur”, I come to understand that I have taken something from the surrounding world when I am able to imprison it in an image. I feel primitive in the face of a world that exceeds me, but in this case, the “excess of objects” is not natural, but cultural; I feel like an imaginer of fetishes in the midst of one culture that is collapsing and another that has not yet been enunciated as such, like a mirror with the ghost of a dead person in front and the future latency of an unborn child. I feel this way because I feel like an artist in Latin America during the second half of the 20th century.
I have always felt art to be a way of relating to the surrounding world not in an analytic way, but rather close to “bricolage”; but I have also always felt these cultural surroundings to be chaotic and full of signs of different order, for which reason I have never believed that an established manner of communication serves in order to grasp this surrounding world in terms of ideas of order and harmony […]
This is why I have said many times that I didn’t leave painting, but that painting left me at the moment when I wanted it most, but, like the tango says, it came back on its own when I least expected it. I think I can explain why it came back, and today we are together, better than ever.
I tried applying the concept of revelation—which art encloses within itself—to everyday life precisely because I felt that in overall terms today, painting cannot symbolically cover a world that is full of signs in opposition and therefore incapable of being symbolized.
I missed painting as an excellent therapy because I felt complete in it, but due to that very plenitude, it seemed to me to be treacherous. I felt that its elitist circulation in the contemporary world was inadequate. I felt that it was in crisis, and not due to my own experience, but also on account of everything I was seeing all around me. I felt that Western art history had developed a logic that consisted of enunciating an image and then taking it apart into little pieces in the same way that a woman performs a striptease until she winds up naked. I never spoke about the death of painting, however (although they have credited me with doing so), like others did, for the simple reason that I have no vocation as funeral director, but rather for life. But if people do speak about the death of painting, it’s because it was not me alone, but many people who felt that crisis. And I continue to believe and feel everything that I believed and felt, in spite of the fact that I now paint.
I also believed that art could never die because art is the adventure of humanity itself, which is very alive, above and beyond the field of the classical arts. Its like when Niels Bohr, as a scientist, said: “Everything is possible on the condition that it is sufficiently absurd”; or when anonymous, but juvenile hands in social rebellion write: “Be realistic, ask the impossible”. And I believed that because I agreed with Coleridge’s definition of art: “to make the external internal, the internal external, to make nature thought, and thought nature”.
I also believed that if the Western image was naked, it was not, in any case, the image of my Latin American people, who have yet to write their history of grandeur and as such, that of their own image (I consider that power is none other than the power to be). But it isn’t possible that artists invent this image; only the people as a whole will be able to do that, in a process of cultural enunciation that occurs through society and politics.
I felt that Latin American painters were moving against the grain of history, and that they had to provide an image for a culture that had not yet been enunciated. And, true to my conscience, I felt the aesthetics of nostalgia (that which has nourished all of Latin American art, making reference first to Europe and later to the United States, and like all nostalgia is characterized by distance from one’s self) to be completely dead because that is what it has always been.
I believed all these things. That is why I couldn’t paint. I continue to believe them, and yet now I paint.
I tried out putting an image to that chaos by way of its paradoxical contradictions using the language of conscience, which is that of words; I tried to clarify for myself all the contradictions I felt in my surroundings through thought […].
