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13/6/2007

Xavier Toubes

Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea CGAC, Santiago de Compostela

Behind the Fields

Curator: Vincent Mcgourty

The lyrical fields which mark out the work of Xavier Toubes range in magnification from the smallest, a tile of several centrimetres, to one that seeks expression beyond the bounds of containment: the all encompassing magnetic field of cosmos. The territories exist. They are the realm of experience. These descriptions without a place are the unfolding journey of the artist “Bodying forth”. Of entering a state where identity is dissolved, and becomes perfectly fluid.

The title of the exhibition Tras dos agros is a work from 2005. It is possible to make out other words, and even complete phrases, in the calligraphic skin that the artist weaves across his field of plates in another work Melodien (2004-2007). These referents are sometimes the names of places in the history of the artist’s memory. Borne in him as he was born into them. They refer to a common place, that of writing. On the one hand, by using his native language the artist insists on the specifics of the original word-repositories, and, on the other hand, he emphasizes that local meaning is only one aspect of a work’s sedimentation. We might think of a libretto whose cadences and rhythms are prioritized above literal translation. Writing is the action of the body; the trace of the artist’s physical presence agitated in the work.

It has not been the intention to create a linear panorama of the artist’s work and development, but, rather, to map out a terrain which indicates possible routes through a landscape which remains fluid. To paraphrase the poet Antonio Machado: Walker there is no path, you make the path by walking. The unfolding experience of the work, in this way, creates an emotional time span both liquid and mobile. This encounter acts as metaphor for the way the artist emphasizes simultaneity in his work. London, Sargadelos – the flicker of a small bird captured off camera –, China, all these places are of the here and now: miniaturized into a synchronic whole.

Plates are the slightest of vessels. The pedestal of food, they serve, display, and even flaunt their contents (the whole panoply from grape to Baptist’s head), but they don’t – unlike other containers – have the capacity to preserve, process, transform, or truly hold anything beyond the gratification of the immediate. As receptacles they are the technological refinement of a leaf, or an outstretched palm. They commemorate the world of the temporal. In a sense, they represent the threshold between “the raw and the cooked”; between the world of natural abundance, which only requires the minor intervention of a flat surface to serve up the available bounty, and the world of cultural production, with its attendant fruits of his and her labours. Foresight enables humans to fashion containers that can stabilise natural processes, cultivate decay to the refinement of acquired taste, and transform organic matter through heat. But containment isn’t all about planning for the future, the vessel holds the possibility of a memorial cavity. The dying embers of voices, kindled as echoes in a plate’s shallow concavity.

Toubes has long been drawn to the metaphor of cloud (Nube, 2007; Nube0041, 2007) as representing a shifting density suggestively able to embody continual metamorphosis: a carrier of multiple shapes. As an agent of mobility, constantly being on the move, it has further relevance for this artist’s work. Movement as a transformation process is a central metaphor to it. A notion of continuity in a process of mutability. There is a strong sense of the voluptuary in Toubes’s sculpture. From the fecund and excessive asymmetry of the Augas (1997) to the heated skin of Polvo’s meltdown. Polvo3 (2002) implies an awkward and risky movement; the bodily kind, prone to gravity and dependent on the surrounding environment. A structure expressive of the contingent – its fragility tangible. The connectedness of mind linked to the pathos of the body. A visibly mortal coil. Precarious and uncertain, the denuded structure appears to be stripped down from the two other incarnations that share its name. It’s flayed skin hung on the walls close by in the form of Dust (2002-2007). Skeletal, it stands, metaphorically, ‘undone’. The undoing, then, of the Cartesian cogito: the first-person, singular ‘I’ of metaphysical self-enclosure. And what new prospects lie ahead for the Cabezas (2007) of the Exquisite Nomads? Dust (2007) suggests the worlds captured in Hubble’s lenses. The aspiration remains, only now it’s the cosmic horizon.

CGAC
Valle Inclan s/n - Santiago de Compostela

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