This exhibition of new works by Asier Mendizabal is titled (or, rather, untitled) after one of the
pieces in it. This would suggest that this piece, or its title (or lack thereof) functions as a key to
access the content, the intentions or the links proposed in the show. It very obviously fails to do
so. Not only because its rhetorical self denial as a title, some sort of paralipsis, shirks this
function, but also because its allusion, between brackets, to linguistics evokes a formalist
approach that hardly helps in identifying a narrative content.
The untitled piece is a sculpture of a strange virtuosity that reproduces an exercise of deftness, a
common task of craftsmanship among carpenters to prove dexterity by carving out a chain, with
all its separate links, out of one piece of timber, but this time out of a whole chestnut trunk. The
monumental as well as dysfunctional scale of the artifact confronts us with an expectation of a
metaphor, of a symbolic function, which is somehow negated by the open polysemy of such a
loaded sign. It is, nonetheless, its metonymic behaviour that proposes a structural relation with
the totality of the exhibition. The association of the structural elements, the links that form the
chain, is one of repetition and difference, each of them being carved in a very gestural manner,
reminiscent of certain expressive realisms, associated with an ideologically coded
monumentality.
Also included in the exhibition, and in concert with this signifying spatial relation of contiguity,
Rotations (Moiré/Foule), is a series of silkscreen prints that reproduce photographic
representations of multitudes from the illustrated press, mainly from early 20th century
publications. Mendizabal has often recalled the moment in which the first photographic
representations of massive gatherings started circulating as a moment of selfawareness,
in the
advent of the mass as a political subject, determined by the form of its photographic image. The
seminal descriptions of the mass in modern sociology, often deriding and distrustful, coincided
with its first mechanic representations. Before the use of photography, the illustrated press
represented multitudes with etchings, in which delicate filigrees formed abstract backgrounds of
little stylized, indeterminate heads. Photography inadvertently introduced an interesting
representational paradox, because if the main subject of these representations was the totalising
form of the mass, randomly spread in the available street space, always shot from above, one
could recognise the features of each individual constituting this very form, indiscriminately
registered in the take.
The metaphor implied in this complex simultaneity of figure and background, form and content,
in the particular case of the representations of the multitude, reminds us that the tension between
these two modes of political subjectivity, individual and collective, has never ceased to be in the
center of the discussion as much as hegemonic discourses have found a priority in concealing it.
The mass printed reproductions, though, use a dot screen that overlaps the grid of little points
with the pattern of little heads forming the crowd, often generating somewhat blurred optical
effects very similar to the Moiré patterns that result from overlapping grids. The final form we
recognize as symbolic is very often determined by its technical possibilities, and this
determination conditions, in retrospect, the very subject matter it represents.