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INTRO
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B I O - C A R T O G R A P H I E S . ... I begin to read his arcane messages, to decipher codes, cryptic cartographies of age-old words, figures and mantras thrown on the canvas as though they were articulating hermeneutic continuity, even a trans-textual and/or textural geometry that vindicates the ideogram (the word that becomes empty, then a sign, an object, cities2, bodies, a blotch). Here is the world in the rough or dry, wrinkled skin of his canvas. Visual, direct, abstract associations rather than the literal, symbolic and unreliable descriptions that come from the commonplace perspective of words. He draws the nothingness, which is another way of saying conflicts and things, that is beyond any literal explanation, beyond the existential ideas of the body and its illicit acts. His work is a trans-versal treatise, a record, a trace, a snaky line, a(n) (a)moral pre-eminence, a dissonance that invokes an eloquent, pictorial prose. It is not a definition but a dislocation. His use of volume is not a stoic feature, a reaffirmation of existence per se, nor a gesture that reaches for the unfathomable eternal (which, if it were possible, which he doubts, would be doubt itself), but an oblique, divergent fusion/fission. But above all it is a cynicism that does not just poison with pessimistic allusions, but stands back and reflects on the last vestiges of what is alive. This, in the form of primitive codes, to use his term, traces a graph that dates from our ancestral past to the present day, from our homo-ancestor to the urban animal, from the art-object to visual, literary, political and philosophical cultivation… without attempting to represent a linguistic study, an alibi or an historical chronology of images used in writing…. Being (a body, a word, a sign, a book, a city and the world, urbi et urbi) as a brushstroke, as a trace, as writing itself, the veil over things. The impact all this creates in (our) life (…) is a reflection of his cryptic, ancient inheritance... |
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1 Extract from the text “Bio-Cartographies. The Mutating Continent” (Theoretical Introduction to Raúl’s Work) by Adrián Morales Rodriguez. This monograph is to be published soon. 2 In the original text ciudades (cities), the part in bold being a veiled reference to Hades. |
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