The English term chosen as title for Alan Sastre’s first solo exhibition refers to a group of figures describing the recurrent forms of difficulty found when trying to articulate something that cannot be expressed. Babble can be the infantile speech of a baby who cannot yet talk, the unintelligible voice of someone who expresses himself in a haphazard and rushed way, the hubbub of voices mingled and mistaken with each other, or the murmur of water flowing between stones and rocks. Depending on these different meanings, the ineffable is presented in four modalities or dimensions: (1) not knowing or not being able to know yet, (2) attempting to give voice to something that cannot be said in any way —so it loses the form of a thought and becomes a circumstance occurring to us—, (3) as the excess of knowledge that unsuccessfully aspires to be simultaneously deployed in an information-saturated social environment, and (4) the intriguing spontaneity of those processes of emergence where a chaotic noise given at one scale evolves into a transcendental and neutral natural order at another level. However, Babble does not arise as a reflection on the difficulty understood as something to resolve, invalidate or alleviate, but as an essential component of the range of possibilities nourishing the intensity and aperture of the work of art. In Confronting Images, Georges Didi-Huberman advocates for a certain «self-evidence that is somehow obscure» as a pivotal element of an art also characterized as a «braid of knowing and not knowing». Babble materialises and presents to the viewer this obscure ambiguity, but not only as the remaining trace of Alan Sastre’s particular way of confronting the material, formal and metaphysical dilemmas of the creative process, but also conveying to the spectator this root difficulty in its most faithful manifestation. For this reason, the seductive and misleading forms that live in his paintings —like the almost completely flat nature of artworks that give the impression of a prominent relief— are the axes of a system of dualities, discrepancies and antagonisms where the difficult becomes the transparent expression of an invisible order in which the contingent and the absolute find the most consistent of their equilibriums.
titsay
germansingergirl
romaincrisis
snowghoul
turnnoffyourmind
gamechangershow
