Dialogues with Pinazo: In Absences. Manuel Bellver

The IVAM presents the third dialogue with the exhibition ‘Pinazo: identities’ based on the work of Manuel Bellver “In absences”.

Artist’s text:

Ignacio Pinazo’s work inscribed in modernity always encourages us to ask ourselves, to investigate what he manifests in his work, both in his plastic oeuvre and in the written notes, where an active mind is revealed that not only settles for painting and making drawings (which is already a lot) but also searches and reflects on the reality that he had to live.

In the context of Pinazo: Identities we are presented with a series of themes that necessarily requires us, from contemporaneity, an analysis of his work, of his contributions to the art of his time and our present. It is in the last theme, “Absences”, where, from the logic of my work, I intend to establish connections between two ways of understanding the concept of absence implicit in a plastic and poetic language. In these visual manifestations, we understand absence, both in Pinazo’s work and in mine, as an emptying of presences adhered to the internal logic of the plastic experience.

My works are born from the need to find images that identify the impulses before the observation of manifestations, both in the external issue and in the psychology of the observer. The observer is the object of his own observation. This kind of image in motion inside a temporary fluid does not intend to stop the moment. On the contrary, he tries to move with the fluidity of the immediate. Certainly, the image, never definitive, collects what happens and, now, what happened. I work with images that flow still now and serve what was there — what I perceived — when they were made, but which, inexorably, are vestiges, presences of absences. So in my proposals (photographic images, drawings, paintings, sculptures…) there is always something in absence. There are people, animals, plants, geological movements, atmospheric manifestations…

The works I present in this dialogue with Pinazo’s creation start from my experiences when I place myself in front (or in the middle) of a mountain very close to my place of residence. A territory where my own contemplative experience does not feel alien to the facts and things that happen in this space inserted in my everyday life. At the Foot of the Mountain (dietary), a collection of 365 photographs (one every day at different hours), is the corpus of a full year where observations of changes and absences are fixed.

The series of 190 drawings with the same title as the photographic diary includes, although not every day, many of the days of a year, the experience of being there. A being where experiences lived in the mountain itself and in others, some distant hundreds of kilometres from here and very distant in time, overlap. This series plastically brings together a poetics of absence (without any nostalgia) where it is evident that whoever observes – in this case the artist – is permanently, without memory, present in absence.

Likewise, the video The Other Skins (outside night) is an attempt to present the verification of the presence-absence relationship that exists inside and outside the spaces where I develop my daily activities. The camera shows the walls that delimit life on the outside and inside. An exterior where you go to meet natural manifestations, physical materials or not, which may in some cases be used in the construction of plastic works. The interior space is of serenity, reflection and work. Interior and exterior establish a dialectic that manifests ambiguous speculation and, at the same time, is multifunctional in its functions.

In a holistic conception of the world, and accepting the principle of impermanence, everything is related to everything, and nothing is enduring.

Conscious of his voicelessness, of the limitations of language, of the impossibility of saying, there is always a babbling with which the artist wants to leave traces, signs that testify to his being in the world.

Manuel Bellver