Consistency. An essay by Amador Bertomeu and Leo Caballero

Causality is the defeat of any other kind of intelligibility
(Jorge Wagensberg)


Observing, selecting, understanding. The beginnings of coherence.
 
Selecting is in itself a way of understanding. Classifying, separating, comparing, putting together… From the very start of this selection process you have a theory; a theory which later on you will be able to explain and which you will try to explain to yourself, either by means of a new selection or by creating an explanation of this selection.
 
Evidently, in order to understand it is necessary to observe –to as great an extent as possible– similarities, likenesses, differences, contrasts, technical solutions, gestures in drawing, textures in engravings, cuts in metals, colour combinations, conceptual derivations, idiomatic semantics, reinterpretations of traditions, attempts to communicate, underlying forces, subtle transgressions, complex simplicities...
 
It is in the intersections of these concepts where we seek out and identify the ideas we want to show and communicate. This constant acquisition of new elements, whether through osmosis or familiarity, gradually –or sometimes not so gradually– alters our conception of beauty and ugliness, of truth and lies, of what is good and what is bad, of what is useful and what is useless.
 
We work in an intuitive world where caresses and close contact exist between what we have grasped and what we have not yet understood, between what we have seen and what we have not yet observed. And if we do pick up on certain ideas, we do not do so by applying clearly delimited parameters, since that would mean restricting our power of observation while at the same time ignoring the complexity of the new and established messages implicit in the object. We are constantly alert, caught between the comfort of our prejudices and the treasonous nature of what is presented to us as new.
 
If scientific methods enable us to understand without the need to use our intuition –a process of reasoning, a syllogism, leads us to a new idea whose validity can be checked and predicted–, in the artistic paradigm we can intuit without needing to understand.
 
 
Living through aesthetic language. Towards a broader and more intense conception of reality.
 
It is all too frequent within the human condition –at least the contemporary one– to confuse what being is with what being should be, to confuse what there is with what we would like there to be, to confuse what we do with what we would like to do. Reality is always a considered reality, and therefore a fictional, quantic, multiple, treasonous, liquid and vague reality, both liberating and wonderful.
 
Faced with this inevitable state of affairs, something tells us that living through aesthetic language offers the possibility of playing out this fiction with more dignity.
 
Why more dignity? It can be argued that following an evolutionary process through time, over the course of human history, language as a general tool of thought and communication has shifted from usefulness to abstraction, from science to spirituality, ending up –as we see it– at the most inclusive and evolved stage of all: art.
 
Why is art the most evolved language?
The world of art necessarily calls on us to live in a game whose rules take us to a place where reality has greater mass, greater density. The best works, which, whether due to simplification or quite the reverse, we inhabit for the longest periods of time, contain more solutions to possible enigmas, answer more questions, comprise more ironies, transgress more boundaries.
 
The artist's function is to make the very most of this necessarily all-embracing world. It is necessary to adopt an all-embracing approach that encompasses intrusion, disobedience, guerrilla tactics, opposition, breaking with established norms, challenging prejudice, draining in order to fill… The artist must be the professional of the all-embracing approach. Nevertheless, in order to be a true transgressor, they must have strong prior knowledge of what they are playing with. They must know the rules of the game, be familiar with all the trades they work with.
 
Given the artist's function, it follows that the gallery owner's function is also to understand, speak and necessarily live through this language, explaining, defining and delimiting it through simple selection, staging, words, a text, analogies, comparisons, contrasts, questions… In short, by using and understanding language itself in order to create more language.
 
 
Art, the realest reality.
 
Our coherence is therefore mainly based on transmitting the idea that in art the density of reality is very high, that the capacity to experience reality honestly is very high and that the chances of finding an intelligent response to most of life's questions are very high.
 
Because within the language of art the density of reality is directly proportional to the capacity for synthesis contained by a work of art. A work of art is a node with a very high mass density, a point in space with a very strong gravity pull. It is truly a black hole: difficult to understand, emotionally upsetting, capable of taking us to another dimension, very difficult to define in any language other than its own.
 
 
Consistence is physical and cultural in nature.
Consistence is the result of coherence.
Coherence is not sought out or discovered but rather it is done.
Coherence is the capacity to transmit an idea.


> This text was writen for the catalogue Le Stanze del Possibile, an exhibition curated by Nichka Marobin & Hannah Gallery in October 2019.