ASIER MENDZABAL

Thru 14 July 2012

This exhibition of new works by Asier Mendizabal is titled (or, rather, untitled) after one of the pieces in it. 
This would suggest that this piece,  or its title (or lack thereof) functions as  a key to access the content, the
intentions or the links proposed in the show. It very obviously fails to do so. Not only because its rhetorical self
denial  as  a title shirks  this function,  but  also because its  allusion,  in parenthesis,  to linguistics  evokes  a
formalist approach that hardly helps identify a narrative content. The ‘untitled’ piece is a sculpture of a strange
virtuosity that reproduces  an exercise of skill,  a common task of craftsmanship among carpenters  to prove
dexterity by carving out a chain, with all its separate links, out of one piece of timber, but this time out of a
whole 4m chestnut trunk. The association of the structural elements, the links that form the chain, is one of
repetition and difference, each of them being carved in a very gestural manner, reminiscent of an ideologically 
coded monumentality. 
Also included in the exhibition, Rotations (Moiré/Foule), is a series of silkscreens that reproduce photographic
representations  of multitudes  from the illustrated press,  mainly from early 20th century publications. 
Mendizabal  has  often recalled the moment  in which  the first  photographic representations  of massive
gatherings started circulating as a moment of self awareness, in the advent of the mass as a political subject, 
determined by the form of its  photographic image.  Photography inadvertently introduced an interesting 
representational  paradox, because if the main subject of these representations was the totalizing form of the
mass, randomly spread in the available street space, always shot from above, one could recognize the features 
of each individual  constituting this  very form, indiscriminately  registered  in the take.  The mass printed 
reproductions use a dot screen that overlaps the grid of little points with the pattern of little heads forming the
crowd,  often generating somewhat  blurred optical  effects very similar to the Moiré patterns  that  result of
overlapping grids.  The final  form we recognise as  symbolic is very  often determined by its  technical 
possibilities, and this determination conditions, in retrospect, the very subject matter it represents. 
Mendizabal lives and works in Bilbao, He has been the subject of major exhibitions at MACBA, Barcelona, 
Reina Sofia, Madrid and Raven Row, London and was featured in the 2011 Venice Biennale. This is his first 
solo show at the gallery

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