3.1416

(DELTA OF SUGGESTIVE MEANINGS)

Donaldo Altamirano*

“Meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table” ?such was the imaginary starting point that Maldoror (that favorite creature of Lautréamont) leaves established in a rush to expand the limits and to broaden the esthetic thresholds of our contemporariness, rather than motivated by the pretension of defining and closing frontiers for our current times of feverish creativity, times that in the epoch of this Montevidean poet could scarcely be glimpsed.

A legitimate descendent of that original surrealist copulation between a machine and an umbrella, this sample “3.1416” brings together, in a coherent audiovisual ensemble?an emerging artist of vanguard sound, the Honduran Walter Suazo, and a visual artist of broad international credentials, the Colombian Jorge Restrepo?who have combined their creative capacities to interlink this interdisciplinary proposal.

Meta-artistic metaphor, movement of conceptual display, bold balance of combined intellectual forces, the yoking together of hybrid dynamisms, created for the delight of the eyes, the ears and the brain, which brings together our perceptions, “3.1416” creates the context of a poetic polymorph, whose operations are processed on the other side of the habitual conceptual frontiers, joining three sequences of dissimilar impressions in one harmonious work, which converge toward their unitary expression at a point of greater intensity.

As for the visual proposal, Restrepo’s series of black moons (which have been prefigured by hundreds of trials and experiments, limited to the study of the relations among his dark circles, to the possible balance or imbalance of their physical masses against the aseptic desert of some blank pages) suggest a world of extreme technology, where both beings and things have been reduced to a punctual expression, which, however, can be read as a series of notes belonging to a disused but fantastic melodic scale. That is what Walter Suazo has demonstrated to us when he created the sound track that accompanies Restrepo’s work.

Walter Suazo’s sound sequence, which appears inspired by the unusual and terrifying closeness of the stars, celebrates the genesis of some unpublished universes, where the melodic punctuation appears to proceed through rarefaction and condensation, as Anaximenes of Miletus would have liked. Music of the Pythagorean spheres evokes frozen moon tides, sidereal migrations, nebulous shadows, surprised at the moment of gestating multiple eclipses, melodic patches, sonorous studding driven by those “leaps that the energy of a corpuscle experiences at the moment in which it absorbs or emits radiation,” as Max Planck would have explained.

Nevertheless, he who examines both proposals separately would proceed erroneously, given that interlaced, they create a third separate system?a new atmosphere of meanings, an intense zone of convergences that appeals to the signs that circulate through our secret lymph, beyond our mere audiovisual capacities, thereby creating an unusual significant delta, which alludes to a world of invisible presences and inadvertent forces that move toward the whole, the combination of these things, silently and from within.

It just so happens that to finish rounding off the metaphoric reference to the “symbol that represents the approximate ratio between the circumference and the diameter of the circle,” in order to make this encounter between fantastic umbrellas and fairylike machines concrete and palpable, Jorge Restrepo has considered it pertinent to integrate further tridimensional elements in his staging of the scene. These consist in the installation of some boxes with water, where some black spheres float on the surface of this genetic liquid (original element of all evolutional sequences), subject to oscillating and drifting through the intervention, at the will or the whim of the spectators. Metaphor of other metaphors, plural play on reflections, where the visual artist has found novel forms of spatial concretion for the dark worlds that evoke such black moons in a permanent eclipse on the desert surface of the paper.    

“3.1416” is thus a creature that has at least double paternity. A conceptual copulation that operates in the prophylactic vacuum. An erotic aseptic of the concepts binds these divergent worlds together and combines them so that they now coincide at a point that fuse in a close embrace and that begets a new attitude toward art, toward and from the artists. We see in this joint work a contemporary symbol that denotes the erosion, the rupture and the demolition of an obstinate wall that has traditionally separated the artistic disciplines in airtight compartments.

In this work of throbbing contemporariness, both Suazo and Restrepo have understood and identified intensely with the work of their associate artist; both have examined and studied the work of the other with empathy and respect; both have proceeded with affinity and with affection, like motors capable of unleashing and stirring the bottommost depths our greatest creative energies. 

*Nicaraguan writer

Translated by Gertrude Brekelbaum, PhD

Project "3,1416" at Lapido Cultural Center
Montevideo, Uruguay, 2009

   

Project "3,1416" at Modern Art Museum
Santa Cruz, Bolivia, 2009

  
                   

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