“What is hidden is never but what is missing from its place”.

Jacques Lacan

‘The Seminar on The Purloined Letter’. A black and white camera follows a woman who bursts into the artist’s studio. The camera son occupies a face on position, with a chair on the left of the frame. Music begins to play, corresponding to Prokoviev’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’, and the woman starts to take off her clothes and become naked. Her elegant movements are somewhat artificial, particularly in her smaller gestures. After unbuttoning her blouse and bending her head, her hair defies the force of gravity, and that is when we realise that the exercise of taking her clothes off corresponds to the reverse process, as the woman is putting her clothes on and the artist is showing us it from back to front. Our awareness of this is disturbing: the illicit feeling of watching the woman undressing become the frustrating exercise of the opposite, she is getting dressed.

This description of the video Parasite, by Julião Sarmento, reminds us that things are not always what they seem. In this case the manipulation to which Julião Sarmento subjects erotic behaviour becomes even more complicated when we discover that the film is in fact a palindrome (a word that is read the same way from back to front or front to back) although it is not symmetrical. Everything fits into that capacity Julião Sarmento has always had to move through approximations, suggestions and glimpses that do not allow one to see the whole thing. In a certain sense it is as if it all is a perverse game of appearances, of voyeuristic insinuations. Julião Sarmento leaves out a series of data and sometimes denies the image so much that it we soon see what is the greatest of his obsessions: flirting with the impossible, with what cannot be seen, with desire. As spectators we are relegated to a pile of intuitions, given that Sarmento simply insinuates an image that we are then prevented from seeing, to which we have no access. Julião Sarmento uses several different strategies in order to achieve this, such as the framing of the shots, cutting out the faces, the outline of the scenes or the screens that can’t be taken in close up; recourses that all follow the same aim of preventing our seeing, of negating our capacity to see. We might conclude that in his works one never sees everything at the same time, as it all is a product of a fragmented narrative that in many cases seems to be an illusion. Julião Sarmento seeks an open relationship with the spectator, and never draws up a definitive reception or closed conclusion for the first point of view. He thus provokes a world of doubts, of uncertainties, of multiple readings, decomposing reality, making it into sequences and multiplying it, and at the same time being capable of reducing it.

Some years ago Juan Muñoz was wondering about what Julião Sarmento’s forbidden image might be (within the endless multiplicity of images that are divided and complement each other). Does the image exist and has been erased, or has it only inhabited the artist’s mind? It should be noted that for Sarmento desire is not located in the figure, but could be hidden before or after, could inhabit memory, whisper from the most silent cadence. Desire does not appear in an explicit manner in the sexual aspect, but in the touch that is out of our reach, in the gaze that we sense, in the imperceptible gesture that it is difficult to capture. The answer is through that desire to go on looking, completing what is incomplete. For this reason Sarmento never ends his works with a definite final moment, because he gives us the option to freely complete whatever we want to. Everything follows a measured balance capable of defining, and at the same time hiding, the missing piece. Julião Sarmento spurs on our imagination and expectations through an impossible trompe-l’oeil of an image that is not an image, but an illusion, a desire.

Something like the absent works made by Alain Urrutia, images on performances that are superimposed over a mural painting that suggests Beuys explaining art to a dead hare, covering up and overlapping in some places, playing with that idea of parenthesis or absence that prevents us from completing the image. Aktionismus, as its title states, takes its reference from the photographic material from some of the most characteristic performance-actions of the seventies, which at the time emerged with a libertarian vocation and as a radical protest and at the same time were a deliberate experimental desire. Alain Urrutia does not make a version of the facts, nor a rereading of these images; his aim is to achieve through painting what Roland Barthes pointed out in Camera Lucida in relation to photography: the capacity to mechanically reproduce what could never be physically reproduced. So this is not a matter of describing but of aesthetically representing that material that was produced exclusively to be a documentary.

In Aktionismus there is a representation of a past that no longer exists, functioning as a memory creating a past that takes place precisely through the recreating act of recall. In his paintings there is no depiction of the real physical space, but of the liquid surface that reflects it. However, in the work by Zoé T. Vizcaíno that spectral character is even more literal. It is true that the structure of the archive is spectral, but when that condition is provoked through rupture, the abolition of the setting and the representative space and takes place through reflection on water, the emphatic nature of that process takes place with greater plenitude. In this case it is through a landscape that is torn at the same that the threshold becomes visible when the door is opened, leaving room for flight.

Zoé T. Vizcaíno works the marks that lead us to mix up the landscape in her series Estudio sobre el Umbral [Study on the Threshold]. In these works a stone violently breaks in and causes the accident: implosion, rupture vomited inwards. The stillness of the landscape is thus brusquely interrupted through the creation of an abyss in the shape of a hole. The violent contact between the stone and the water brings a Forefront to the image that adds the feeling of depth, and at the same time as it grants it a three dimensional nature it breaks this possibility by showing the liquid quality of the visible reality. The picture freezes a moment that is practically imperceptible to the naked eye and allows the impact to be shown and to live alongside the landscape moments before it disappears. This skilful photographic ability, which she will later broaden into the video format in a sort of deconstruction-reconstruction of this act, takes place seconds before the landscape is destroyed and always through one take, with no later editing.

We conclude, then, a series of reflections and absences. Despite the artifice involved, the surface of the water is still flat and the photograph depicts a two dimensional space. Meantime, the elements present on the surface of the water provoke chance interventions on the image. We are talking about ruptures, but also about a tissue of marks that go beyond the linear concept we have to describe the story. As for Derrida, for many artists writing means grafting. Each text or each image always refers to other texts and to other images, which are intertwined, are mutually contaminated, but which are also disseminated and function through a redoubled logic. All of this also is true in the paintings by Stefan Hirsig, and in the way that these are a surface with a structure of colourfields, geometrical stripes and organic shapes. His compositions are made more complex through the bringing together of different abstract shapes that are crystallised in a painting that in many cases has a direct relationship to architecture and the formal language of painting. The world of music or that of fashion has been a source of inspiration for him, and although many of these elements can be recognised in his paintings it is impossible to separate them from those that at first sight seem to be more abstract, given that among them they form Stefan Hirsig’s particular, ambiguous and complex creative universe, both on the level of content and of shape. Perec points this out in Life: A User’s Manual: in a puzzle it doesn’t matter much whether the first image is considered to be easy or difficult, given that we should not think that the subject of the painting or its technique determines its difficulty, but rather the subtlety of the cut. So the interesting aspect about Hirsig’s discontinuous style is precisely that: his capacity to show signs of the image, to syncopate the gesture, to erase what has apparently been resolved.

This disseminated character is even more obvious through the pictorial gaze presented by Álvaro Negro, an artist capable of analysing the genre from the most contemporary developments without losing sight of its history; that is, seeking within tradition the guiding lines for the most current pictorial problematics. In his latest works there is an emphasis on their poetic aspect and on the power of the text as a vital element, which is also visual, in order to narrate everyday life and the unique nature of the experience of gazing. The outside is interiorised within a time that captures and paralyses the extraordinary within a moment. In this sense his interest is centre don the visualisation of a process, whether this is the solar movement of a chiaroscuro or the flowing of painting; both with the camera and with the spatual the image emerges through unveiling or even – through analogy with photography – “revealing” [photographic development]. It is precisely this latter concept, that of “revealing”, that may explain the conceptual connections that his painting establishes between painting, photography or video. We are talking about painting and time, about gestures and moments, but above all about movements and pictorial gestures that the artist himself considers to be “surface traces”. Hence the fitting and evocative title of his last series, Abro la ventana y respiro el aire fresco del fin del mundo [I open the window and breathe in the cool air of the end of the world], and the poetry of his text: “Stopping painting without doubt represents a renouncing, a veritable sacrifice: losing one’s body, coming out of the world. It is also true that all sacrifice hides something of selfishness, because it is done under the condition of getting something in exchange; although, like in my case, you don’t know what you want”. Like many contemporary artists, and, obviously, like we spectators of that so complicated universe, which is sometimes so cryptic, sometimes so simple, all that remains is to get that missing piece, the one that allows us to finish the puzzle.