Cosquillas para tus ojos

Mariscal

30/11/89. (Sala 113)

This is a very new exhibition for me. Not only because I am doing it right now, but because it is new in the method and the language I use.

A long time ago, Mr. Duchamp and several others, the Dadas, the Surrealists, the Cubists and the Pops and so on, used the language of Ready Made.

I have started from this language by setting it up first as a game. A children’s game, where I myself make rules and laws. Fernando Salas, my studio neighbor in Poble Nou, introduced me to a junkyard we have very close by. It’s very big. There is everything. Well, almost everything.

Abandoned objects, leftovers, scraps, pieces, small pieces of objects that have existed and have ended up in this warehouse, are passing through my eyes and then through my hands and loaded into the van. It’s like a dance, you are making your way through the warehouse and discovering the terrain. The objects appear and they discover you and you discover them.

It’s the first time you make associations of ideas, forms and functions. In the workshop I arrange them on large tables, visually. There’s a continuous reflection and letting chance bring one piece of junk to another, and that’s how things start to come out.

Then in the Promac workshop, a team of professionals of these new professions that come out of the cinema, advertising, TV, major festivals, the new technological falleros who can build an explosion of a car or five thousand plastic dwarf dolls.

The Promac glue, build, weld, adjust and enjoy putting love in these objects.

Then again at home they go through one and a thousand visual retouches, some are destroyed, others are put back together, others are simply put in place.

This is how the process has been for a short time, thinking about this new exhibition.

I know I am not inventing anything. The only thing I wanted to do was to try a new language. To reflect on the objects, to have again in my hand and in my mind things that are beautiful, that one day were abandoned, that died, that are no longer useful, and to recompose forms by playing at being objects. Each piece, when you analyze it, tells you things, you see yourself within a chain of men who have designed, manufactured, assembled, sold, bought, transported, used, discarded these objects and that for the last time have a chance to exist again, this time out of context. This junk today, which is mixed with older junk, tells us again about what the objects we normally use are like and the why of forms and functions.

I don’t know, anyway it’s a game that tickles my brain and also tickles my eyes. Yours and mine.

Javier MARISCAL.  

Barcelona, November 1989.