Jorge Contreras
Formas de presencia. 2011
1. Everyone Is Made of Art
And in some way, art is about life in all its dimensions: superficial and profound experiences and emotions, sacred and perverse; great and small events, situations that strike us as contradictory and coherent, luminous or dark. Art constitutes a way of life, a way of being in the world. The world constructed by the system and the set of practices we call art increasingly resembles a poem—a world that can only be intuited, yet can eventually be touched—and it reveals how much we need it. It is a world whose point of departure is the possibility of linking, through a deeply intimate labor, the humility of each day with the wonder offered by touch, smell, sight, sound, and so on. It is not a world one simply inhabits, but a world in continual construction, where it becomes possible to enjoy every aspect of life—a world in which each gesture is a celebration of our experience as human beings.
This world, in the case of painting, always inaugurates a form of sensibility that oscillates between intelligence and intuition: a sensibility that makes it possible to suffer and to enjoy at the same time each gesture, the daily tasks, the pleasures and necessities that appear in every day, the serene calm and the strange anguish produced by the act of looking.
To explore our way of seeing as human beings—starting from the needs and resources of painting—is to set in motion a reflection on our presence and on the way we are in the world, and thus to account for the understanding we build alongside others.
If the images in painting may appear static, in Armando Zesatti’s works it is the viewer who must carry out the movement: to become a kind of explorer of one’s interior, to react upon oneself, and to bring forth—over “I look”—an “I feel.” In his works, the gaze, like thought, occurs throughout the whole body.
In Horizonte frío (2011), Zesatti manages to make the waves leave their foam like snow along the rocks; the moisture on the stones becomes frozen water; in the background a curtain falls that stops the gaze, rendering the space impenetrable. The image conveys the sensation of a gaze altered by cold; it suggests that this is not an invented landscape but a place the artist has been; and through the subtle tonality of light, he expresses an atmosphere, an emotional disposition.
According to Lacan, all art aspires to seize the gaze. Yet in Zesatti’s paintings there is a journey that explores how the gaze functions and how it is bound to the entire body, to memory, and to the presence of the one who looks—a serene path in search of the peace produced by understanding the will hidden in air, in rocks, in the slow growth of plants and grasses; the serenity produced by an empathic understanding of light as it transforms while touching trunks, leaves, water, and so on.
Far from representation and mimesis, his paintings unfold as an experience of the body—an artifact of sensibility and a device of perception at once—and they take place through a modulation of light and color in relation to space, setting presences in motion, updating forces that exceed the gaze. If the body represents an attachment to matter, in Zesatti’s paintings there is a reference to the mind as the possibility of liberating ourselves from that attachment.
In Piedras con agua (2010), there is a use of light that makes transparent water appear; the effect of the lines over the stones constitutes a filter that, through inferential processes, allows the viewer to perceive the emergence of depth and the movement of water, and at the same time the presence of light and wind. What is the painter’s center of attention? What does he decide to look at with such care? Perhaps not the stones, but the water that covers them, and the conduct of light through water. In doing so, the artist seems to suggest that we pause before the secret life of water—clean and transparent in this painting; turbid and anguished as it strikes rocks in others; he suggests that we explore the mysterious encounter between light and the gaze, observing the fracture produced by the appearance of images.
To the extent that the artist assumes the risk of involving his paintings with other forms of understanding—to the extent that an artist decides to risk his gaze in order to observe the desire of light, to comprehend the perspective of rocks, to feel the anxiety of water—he reminds us that it is not enough to inhabit the world in order to be alive; and that perhaps it is possible, through his work, to access the humble pleasure of discovering our own presence.
2. Inventing Words
Sea, water, stones, air, plants, and grasses appear as a way of thinking and, with that, of meditating; in his work, painting is a form of presence. If the kind of understanding we usually demand requires the imposition of a beginning and an end in order to organize experience—constructing sequences of actions, gestures, attitudes, and recognizable emotions in order to generate the confidence that allows us to take responsibility for the way we are in the world—in the case of these paintings, light, color, and images simply seem to occur through the artist.
His paintings find an ancient and new tone that reminds us that a simple gaze in art, as in human life, is already aesthetic in itself. They also present a sensibility oriented toward exploring the nature of human imagination, and toward accounting for painting as a form of thought and art as a way of life.
His landscapes and figures do not represent or signify; rather, they are a place where experience occurs, a temporary vehicle of passage. And while we are within each work, it may be possible to intuit the tension and relaxation of the different modalities our presence takes on, and to recognize the way our gaze as human beings also allows us to construct our life and to participate in the life of our world in general.
In Piedras, rocas y montañas (2009) and in Tierra de gigantes (2010), the rocks take on organic forms; they become parts of a body that is not human. They insinuate the existence of a living system composed of elements that appear inanimate, and they give rise to questions about the will that creates the forms of the world, about the desire that moves the water and grants its millennial form to rocks.
Each image proposes that we set aside, for a moment, the need to explain our experience logically, and suggests that we trust an inquiry into oneself—continuous and unexpectedly changing—and that we become comfortable with the vulnerability of the gaze as a process of transition.
In the profound silence demanded by light falling between rocks and sand, we discover the memory of water, the serenity of rocks exposed to the elements at all times; we discover the deep pleasure of dialoguing with nature by employing the ancient and ever-new lexicon of painting—a lexicon of three words, or five, capable of explaining through an image our emotions, expectations, desires, and longings.
To explore an image of that lexicon—understanding it in its own unstable nature—implies assuming a relationship with painting as constant modification, in which lines and colors, with all their nuances and tones, disappear only to rise again, following the workings of light.
Thus, the emergence of images marks the place of difference; it calls forth the way we live our desires and our hunger while we observe a painting; it subverts the state of the gaze and bodily disposition; it concentrates the senses in a device that confers integrity upon sensations and organizes the continuous flow of meaning as it becomes language. Each image is, then, an instance of our emotions and our desires.
Within the continuous emotional movement through which human experience unfolds, the affective configurations by which we recognize our emotions appear while they modulate our understanding—and, of course, our conduct. In Zesatti’s work, beyond an intimate dialogue with light, color, and space, there is a reflection on the way emotions become will and behavioral dominion, shaping what it is possible to see.
There are, of course, ten, a hundred, a thousand ways of observing the complex passage of stimuli that constitutes each experience; each allows us to recognize our emotions and to grant—sometimes narratively—an order to each of our days. In the mode of perception proposed by his paintings, the individual dream is exceeded, and through metonymies, synecdoches, and metaphors, the links of a collective thought can be observed.
When we experience a change from one emotion to another, it is a phenomenon similar to a change of mind or body, such that if we observe this process, we can realize that we become other persons, or that what we call the self is composed of several persons.
Even as we explain our experiences within an emotional sphere, the concept of reality appears as something independent of us. The effect of Zesatti’s paintings seems to consist in finding new registers for our behavioral domains, through the patience of observing and feeling—with meticulous care—every detail of his images. In his pieces one can observe the anxiety and the serenity of leaving one’s own life behind and finding another in water, stones, plants, mud, and the traces he paints in order to say something more.
Thus, in his works there arises the possibility of attending the continuous birth of painting, witnessing its origin and at the same time its disappearance: a graphism that may or may not configure an image, repeating until it unravels, becoming a litany that alludes to the secret desire of light to have a body—to present itself while summoning a force that is not human.
Moreover, Zesatti’s work also proposes a reflection on the relationships we construct with other human beings through thought and through the composition of what we call mind. In some way it underscores the ethical dimension of the gaze, and admits the question of responsibility for what we do to one another. If each life unfolds as a conversation with others, and upon that conversation depends our well-being and our suffering, then perhaps in art it is possible to plant the seed of that radical hope which is solidarity.
3. The Fracture of the Gaze
In Aguas cristalinas (2008), Zesatti seems to approach the mystery of the encounter between light and water; he pushes the dissolution of blue and green to the limits of figuration. The fragment captured in the painting, by conveying the movement of water and the decomposition of light into colors and tones, does not refer to an image but to an effect, to a sensation, and to the fundamental question of the water’s intense secret desire.
Since Wittgenstein, it has been common to hold that understanding a word or an image has shifted from its supposed referential content toward the use we make of it. In the case of Aguas cristalinas, it seems that the painter’s proposal is not to decipher the image, but to feel it, and to intuit the desire that gives rise to the gaze.
The strategy of desire uncovered in Zesatti’s paintings seems to be contagion, aware of its character as process: the more it diffuses its mood, moving from one gaze to another, from one body to another, the more it leaves behind pleasure, and sometimes lack or repression. Since desire orients our perception, to investigate through painting what gives rise to it is a way of inquiring into our attachment to, and our appreciation for, everyday experiences.
If the subject, according to Lacan, is fixed in a double position—being the subject who looks at himself while he looks, and who is presented through representation—then in the functioning of paintings, in the conjunction between the point of light that emanates from the subject and the point of light that emanates from the object, what occurs is what Lacan would call the contingent emergence of the gaze.
In Lloviendo en las barrancas (2010), light meets rain—the trace of falling water that is extinguished, transforming into moisture and wind; nostalgia for disappearance. This work brings forth the notion of temporality: images of the passage of time as the tension and relaxation of our presence as human beings, the tension and relaxation of our soul.
In Horizontes (2011), the image of rocks exposed to the constant weathering of the sea also seems to present them as serene witnesses, timeless, to a type of experience that escapes human beings yet belongs to the encounter between sea and rocks—the site where a dialogue occurs whose meaning the painter seems to intuit. Through an intense blue that admits the presence of green mixing within the water to configure the sea’s conduct, Zesatti constructs a sensation of peace.
In many of his works, Zesatti addresses the meeting between sea and sand, with rocks as witnesses and protagonists—monoliths whose forms seem to obey the will of wind, images of sculptures shaped over centuries by nature. In Zesatti’s work, as Gilles Deleuze suggests, painting simply happens: the images do not so much suggest a narrative as make a presence appear; they seek a link between human experience and the sacred.
In his paintings, that presence emerges precisely through the manner in which light appears, touching water, earth, grasses, stones, reiterating that our way of being in the world is ordinarily modulated by attachment and by the emotional domain in which we find ourselves.
Alluding to the marks of time as a modality of experience, past and future meet in his works not as physical movement but as a transformation that allows us, on the one hand, to intuit the finitude of our own life and, at the same time, to discover that the gaze is, in itself, a reflection on our desire and on our modes of presence as human beings.
Jorge Contreras
Oaxaca, 2011