Mario Garcia Torres
20 Sep - 18 Nov 2007
MARIO GARCIA TORRES
A Solo Exhibition
20 September – 18 November 2007
When I met Oscar Neuestern for the first time, I understood that things that go undiscussed are in some ways equivalent to those that are talked about. It was sometimes during 1968. I started visiting Neuestern since I was interested at the time in intentionality. A year later, I published the only text that exists today on Neuestern’s work. That article published in ARTNews was the starting point for the new work by Mario Garcia Torres. The Transparencies on the Non-Act, perfectly reveals Oscar Neuestern’s obsession for the void. While others at the time would carefully move toward the dematerialisation of the work of art, Neuestern was a step ahead: he had built his entire artistic career on absence. This has become the central piece of Garcia Torres’s “A Solo Exhibition” at Kadist Art Foundation.
In this group of works Garcia Torres not only puts together the story of someone who lost himself in memory, but insinuates an extended history of erasure and withdrawal. July 2007, August 2007, An Undisclosed Month in 1953 as well as Monochronich Film on a Polychromic Story (all 2007) take Neuesterns’s ideas of the absolute towards a different approach of the refusal of creativity, while relativising its rapport with fiction. I imagine that Neuestern would have been very surprised to discover that his ever-forgetting thoughts became an inspiration for other artists and that his insistence on removal could actually leave revealing traces.
A Solo Exhibition
20 September – 18 November 2007
When I met Oscar Neuestern for the first time, I understood that things that go undiscussed are in some ways equivalent to those that are talked about. It was sometimes during 1968. I started visiting Neuestern since I was interested at the time in intentionality. A year later, I published the only text that exists today on Neuestern’s work. That article published in ARTNews was the starting point for the new work by Mario Garcia Torres. The Transparencies on the Non-Act, perfectly reveals Oscar Neuestern’s obsession for the void. While others at the time would carefully move toward the dematerialisation of the work of art, Neuestern was a step ahead: he had built his entire artistic career on absence. This has become the central piece of Garcia Torres’s “A Solo Exhibition” at Kadist Art Foundation.
In this group of works Garcia Torres not only puts together the story of someone who lost himself in memory, but insinuates an extended history of erasure and withdrawal. July 2007, August 2007, An Undisclosed Month in 1953 as well as Monochronich Film on a Polychromic Story (all 2007) take Neuesterns’s ideas of the absolute towards a different approach of the refusal of creativity, while relativising its rapport with fiction. I imagine that Neuestern would have been very surprised to discover that his ever-forgetting thoughts became an inspiration for other artists and that his insistence on removal could actually leave revealing traces.