“Beneath the why of things lies the why of the world; knowing exactly what is “in opposition” we might perhaps know the essence of what supports the opposition.”
“En el qué de las cosas, subyace el qué del mundo; sabiendo qué es lo que se contrapone podríamos tal vez saber la esencia del que soporta la contraposición.”
Translated from: The world of object to the light of surrealism.
Juan-Eduardo Cirlot
Barcelona 1986. - Editorial Anthropos
Firstly, I must confess my faith in the supreme force of "objects” in the creation of a "place", the process where it is imposed as a discontinuity of the space.
Nowadays, the characters of “hyper-mass”, “hyper-realistic-image” and the “empty content” of our objects are making them live and die daily in the mirage of their own image. Our culture is celebrating a kind of supreme object in a nonexistent-content-of-world condition.
My work is based on this idea to create that kind of object, where this essence of nonexistent-content-of-world exists. Taking the idea of Cirlot, I have opened a door of a fantasy and I have created this collection of empty-objects, which are showing us the reverse of their image.
I am drawing the shadow. An empty object that re-creates an image thanks to its shadow. Here the image is not the traditional merit and value of my world. Celebrating a great opposition, I look for a poem made by emptiness, I seek the beauty of a drawing made by peculiar ink. The beauty-shadow.
Also, both works, bi-dimensional and tri-dimensional, are immersed in this research of “emptiness”, always looking to configure or to deform into a subtle shape made by their shadows. Consider it a pen for drawing an ephemeral or a non-existent-material.
This collection of empty-objects was first presented in Astarté Gallery this year. It comes from a long stay in the Italian Apennines, between Toscany and Emilia-Romagna. After long walks in the woods of San Benedetto del Querceto, a small town in the mountains, I kept thinking of developing a kind of “language of absence”; to build an object without content, one that can only be expressed by its structure. These collections of objects are trying to show another side to our contemporary object, a resistance against the hyper-image recreated so commonly today.
Finally the object is displayed through its structural system, a complex structure made in paper. Some of them are tri-dimensional: a paper sheet rolled to create a strange shape with a stick-like structure. Others are bi-dimensional: a drawing-cut-out from a paper sheet, a kind of open-lattice structure. Thus, in my work I try to recover the “essence” of our everyday world experience: gravity, support, stress, materiality, density, dynamic-order embodiment, vacuum, absence, location, residual space and, why not, the nostalgia for what we cannot see but presumably it has been at the heart of that matter, where the empty-objects break their magic to trap for a moment the space defined by its edges.
I grew up in Caracas, where I studied at the School of Architecture and Urbanism, Central University of Venezuela, obtaining a degree in Architecture. Simultaneously, I studied Arts at the Institute of Advanced Studies of Arts Armando Reverón. After that, I moved to London to continue my art studies at Chelsea College of Art and Design at the London Institute. Upon finishing this period, I returned to Caracas, where I worked as Professor of Fine Arts and researcher in the Department of Design, Architecture and Visual Arts of the Universidad Simón Bolívar for a period of 4 years.
In mid-2007, I moved to Italy where I began the current investigation. For a year and a half, I have been living and working in the city of Madrid.
Rafael Reveron-Pojan. Madrid, February 2010.
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