Mount Analogue

About

It is protected by an invisible shell and held by an ontological and metaphysical condition impossible to prove. The epic narrative of its conquest begins a speculative exercise on the limits of knowledge, understanding and belief. Daumal’s sudden death of in 1944 left the novel unfinished. 

Besides the content of the story, the use of the novel for a contemporary art exhibition is relevant in relation to the three concepts appearing in the subtitle of the book: “A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing”. These three concepts are present in how we address the flexible nature of artistic practice. The notion of  “Mountain Climbing”, therefore, provides the setting of a specific imaginary, the “Non-Euclidian” free us from relying on things secured and true, and the “Symbolically Authentic” establishes a fantastic contradiction that is brought by the analysis of the meaningful possibilities of language.

The proposals by Rafel G. Bianchi (Olot, Spain, 1967), Teresa Solar Abboud (Madrid, Spain, 1985) and Martin Llavaneras (Lleida, Spain, 1983) are not an illustrative approach to Mount Analogue, quite the contrary. In this regard, Daumal sets a point of departure that, far from imposing itself, remains the possible tone under which to thread an exhibition focused on the management of the incomprehensible.

Rafel G. Bianchi’s work implies a constant review of the artist condition. He develops a metareferential discourse where commitment to humor, irony or game produces a conceptual charge based on antagonistic combinations: success and failure, hope and frustration, knowledge and ignorance, relevance and futility… After a euphoric reading of Mount Analogue, Bianchi recoups old works to confront them with new productions. This generates a set of postcards, photographs and small-format oil paintings that construct a fabulous imaginary, inspired by the perceptive impossibility of Daumal’s scenarios. In addition, the artist adds a curious narrative twist: he extracts phases from the book and titles his artworks with them, a subtle detail that helps questioning the images. While the postcards and photographs show moments related to the anticipation of a physical destiny, the oil paintings bring back two key figures for the artist: Joseph Albers, a reference artist for Bianchi and his research on failure, and Miss Pancake, the protagonist that paints mountains in the novel.

Teresa Solar Abboud’s work uses an audiovisual language and sculpture to explore issues like those of the emotional construction of landscape, the physical qualities of the image or those of nonverbal communication languages. For the exhibition, the artist presents Ghost (2015), a new production linked to her research on sign language. This thesis combines three independent but complementary videos where she includes a series of close references to an extreme vision of narrated experience. First, we witness the sign language gestures corresponding to an “Air Malaysia Ghost Plane” in direct reference to the mysterious disappearance in the middle of the ocean of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 more than a year ago. Next, there is one hand exposed to the optical effects of the Schlieren machine, an apparatus through which we are able to visualize the density of heat produced by bodies or fluids. While we are observing the chromatic changes of the image, a brief fragment of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness challenges us about life in the wilderness. Finally, some hands are modeling in clay, under the same codes of sign language, the word “ghost”, thus giving a material translation to a gesture that exhibits illusory and immaterial traits. Here, a quote of Austerlitz de W. G. Sebald makes a reference to the building of seventeenth century defense fortifications. In short, these three gestural actions developed by the artist expand toward contexts related to unverifiable, inaccurate or directly impossible suppositions.

Martin Llavaneras’ work brings forward a conceptual approach to sculpture using processes where performance, the body and physical endurance play an important role. For this occasion, the artist presents a new installment of The Power of the Press Belongs to Those Who Can Operate One (2014–2015), a long-term project focused on the recovering of lithographic stones that, broken by their continuous use, are restored by Llavaneras through the application of his graphic interventions. This operation points out to a gradual process of erosion, the product of the pressure that the lithographic press applies to each copy, that eventually causes the physical breakdown of the stone. In this sense, the stone claims its double status: as a mechanism of technological production and, at the same time, as organic sediment, combining, therefore, fossilized cultural remains with natural fossils. We witness an inseparable fusion that achieves its ultimate condition: that which, as defended by the anthropologist Bruno La Tour, depends on both human as well as non-human properties. The exhibition shows two of his recent lithographic stones, objects of great analogic precision that the artist brings face to face with the current systems of digital representation, establishing, therefore, several similarities between the micro-pore of the stone and today’s micro-pixel.

In short, Mount Analogue is an exhibition that comes from a share fascination with René Daumal. It develops a three-points-of-view scheme where each of them focuses on discourses that aim to explore unstable perceptions of reality. Although all of them take enough distance from the novel, I can help noticing some pleasant coincidences among the artists and some of the members of the expedition that take part of Mount Analogue. I am thinking, for instance, about Judith Pancake, high-range mountain painter, Ivan Lapse, a notable linguist, or the brothers Hans and Karl, acrobatic climbing specialists.

With Rafel G. Bianchi, Martin Llavaneras, Teresa Solar Abboud

Curated by David Armengol