Nestor Sanmiguel Diest / Jessica Rankin

About

Sanmiguel Diest began to pursue his artistic practice while initially maintaining a career as a pattern maker. Although the artist has long left his work in the field of applied arts behind,this experience — combined with his voracious interest in literature and philosophy — has exerted a broader influence on Sanmiguel Diest‘s schematic thinking and the quasi-mathematical structures that inform his creative process.

Sanmiguel Diest constructs his paintings and works on paper as palimpsests, alternately layering strata of found materials like magazine clippings, newspapers, industrial reports, mail, formulas, and texts atop one another in interplay with layers of ink, paint, graphite, solvents, and ballpen. The artist has developed a lexicon of lines and patterns that he uses to formally delimit fragmented spaces, a practice that carries throughout his oeuvre. He wields superimposed layers of information as screens, simultaneously revealing or hiding a succession of pictorial stories or texts. The series El Suicido de Lucrecia (the Suicide of Lucrecia) - which refers to a historical legend that has been an enduring subject for visual artists, including Titian, Rembrandt, and Botticelli - teems with meticulous systems of lines that vertically bisect the picture plane.

Sanmiguel Diest‘s at times hermetic and highly personal conception of art has resulted in a nuanced vocabulary of methodologies and symbols. Like German artist Hanne Darboven, who employed personally derived numerical systems in the creation of her artworks, Sanmiguel Diest‘s paintings and drawings have an algorithmic quality. However, if we consider an algorithm to be a finite process with a fixed symbolic vocabulary governed by precise instructions, then Sanmiguel Diest‘s alogorithm‘s are unstable, constantly stuttering and realigning themselves as the repetition of one process unlocks new, unpredictible effects. Sanmiguel Diest employs literature — and text more broadly — as a plastic instrument. The writings of references as diverse as the sci-fi master Stanislav Lem, the Dada poet Tristan Tzara, or French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé have all provided inspirations for his work. Sanmiguel Diest refers to these sources, and the formal process of layering different materials atop one another, as working with overlapping layers of ”contaminated information“ — simultaneous events entangled in one another, ”soaked by rain.“

Jessica Rankin is best known for her expansive celestial maps and landscapes, which are interspersed with codes, signs, and symbols that refer to the processes of memory, intuition, and interpretation. Rankin often begins her creative process with the written word, combining stream of consciousness, found texts, stories, memories and fleeting thoughts. She then cuts apart individual words and phrases and recomposes them into new sequences using a method of „guided chance.“ These clusters of texts are then integrated into Rankin‘s drawings and embroideries.

In her current exhibition with carlier | gebauer, Rankin continues to employ constellation maps as a frame of reference. The works on view all refer to a single night sky - a date of personal significance for the artist. By focusing on a discreet, private moment, Rankin places the personal within a broader macro-relationship to time and space. Rankin‘s large-scale embroidery "Field of Mars" depicts a delicate celestial lattice plotting the points between the stars on the date that she found and visited her mother‘s grave. Although the term field of mars extends back to antiquity, Rankin‘s use of the name refers to the cemetery where her mother was buried. Typically ascribed to the women‘s realm, the medium of embroidery proposes an immersive slowness of process that re-inscribes an association that once belonged to military antiquity into a highly subjective poetic reference.

Similarly, landscapes become personal and not simply geographical in Rankin‘s works. Her collage "Could I just have the sober hand" depicts the rolling hills, meadows, and rugged coastline of England. Using photographs culled from the book A Writer‘s Britain, Rankin‘s collage seems to emphasize the seams between each image, highlighting a discontinuity in the depicted landscape that formally evokes lapses in memory and the gap between things as they are experienced and as they are remembered.