Large-scale printed images on film, planes of colour painted directly onto a wall, sheets of transparent and dyed Perspex and PC, metal frames and plywood pedestals… These are the components and materials that make up the Mono-Tones.
The photographs were selected from the archive of carnets for two main qualities: the manifest absence of any direct meanings and the relationships the images suggested with sculpture, architecture and painting. They were then printed on large-scale pages by removing the colour, and their passage through the printer, plotter and photocopier left marks on the film transparency. The black and white became a shaded area on the materiality of the film, shifting our perception of the image towards the field of drawing.
These prints are connected to sheets of Perspex and superposed on colour planes within the framework of a spatial collage. The three dimensions traced out by the frames and pedestals, as well as the distance cast by the reflections from the Perspex, emphasise the unstable nature of these planes: the plane of the image, the plane of its corresponding supports and the planes of those that shape it. They reach such depths that the spectator has to move to read the different planes and perceive the graphics created by their concatenations and dissociations in space.
The Mono-Tones suggest contemporary devices for comprehending painting, the object-painting—for some time now one of my preferred areas of work—but they also hark back to historical forms such as altarpieces and polyptychs. This attention to multiplicity and desegregation in space suggests the empirical fact that, from a given angle, form is content. In today’s politics such a statement is a given, as our current reality never ceases to delight in reminding us, whereas in the history of painting and modern sculpture that formed the backdrop to my training it is viewed above all as a value. As a student I remember reading Marx, who thought that value was “simply empty of content”, which could be very close to what I’ve tried to create in the Mono-Tones.