The Unfinished as An End
David Armengol »»link
About Diego Pujal's individual exhibition at Fidel Balaguer. March 2011
"The book I will like to read is a novel where the coming story feels like a still confused thunder (...), a novel that conveys a messy sensation, nameless and not yet formed..."
Italo Calvino. "If on a winter's night a traveler".
Although being two different kinds of productions (on the one hand, literature, on the other, painting), there is, however, certain conceptual -even formal- likeness between the way Italo Calvino takes literary narrative and how Diego Pujal (Buenos Aires, 1971) explores de proper codes of the pictorial language. If Calvino likes to play with a narrative tension by building expectations that grow without fully developing themselves (or without the need to show that development to the reader), Pujal explores other signifying possibilities for abstract painting (not-representational at least) with a similar complicit playfulness with the receptor. A kind of invisible agreement exists in that relation, one in which, without making it explicit, without being too conscious about it, both, artist and spectator, face the enigmatic linguistic exercise of decoding something near (a more or less recognizable form), and, at the same time, far away (without a fixed meaning).
To that end, the artist uses big canvases and monochromatic backgrounds dominated by one solemn, unique and totemic form. Even better, he uses a non-form, simply sketched, amorph, organic, fleshy, and wishing to break its forced bidimentionality, incapable, as it is, to do so. This, as in the pulsing thrills of Calvino's novels, functions, on the pictorial surface, like a premonitory signifier, puzzled and ambiguous in front of something that offers itself while resists to give itself up, forever withholding its confirmation. In short, it works like a visual mystery that invites the viewer to a kind of interpretative limbo -an impossible, and an in-between position- in which the end result (the final message we are supposed to get) is mixed up by the means employed to reach it (the way to access it).
In that sense, and, although the pictorial language is the basis of the work of Diego Pujal, writing and its rules of understanding are the ultimate productive engine in his work. This is a relationship with text that the artist makes even stronger with the use of cryptic and parodic titles that take inspiration in science, mythology, and even mysticism, and that, like a key word (balna, poren, garlema, mirna, sem, or the series c.s.01, cs.02, c.s.03, unusual for its shortness), suggest an exercise of speculative narrative by which the anxious viewer is invited to fantasize with the unfinished informations that reach him or her. A strange word accompanies a strange painting. A half understood terminology accompanies a half understood form. It is, ultimately, an act of non-combative resistance to the fixed that, in opposition to the open ended (something tiring, and seen very often in abstract painting), stands up as an ironic manifest of a fragility given within the message, a message, nevertheless, voluntarily undefined, and that implies a critical exposure of the means, visual and pictorial, that the artist employs masterfully when doing his job.
For his individual exhibition at Galeria Fidel Balaguer, Diego Pujal shows a dozen recent paintings that function like the unfinished chapters of a longer and, also, incomplete story. They are non-failing and non-succeeding attempts aimed at offering a flexible interpretation, unclassified and undefined, and driven by a search or a need for another type of non-standardized semiotics that would allow us to face and understand what is shown without going through given impositions.
In short, we can say that Diego Pujal's paintings offer us a constant questioning of his condition as a painter. His work, based on cyclical obsessions about language, and after a laborious and slow process (surprisingly closer to that one of a writer than to that one of a painter), results in large format paintings that can only give themselves as something consciously unfinished. It might be, after all, that the imperfect flexibility that his work conveys is the only honest thing that a painting practice can offer us today.
Diego Pujal. Meanders and enigmas of the image
Àlex Mitrani
(text for the exhibition catalog "pintures", 2010. museu d'art modern de tarragona.
also published at the artnotes magazine. nº 31, february 2010, p. 34.)
Apis, Bomod, Pedelpe.... are just some of the suggestive names which Diego Pujal gives his works: we do not know whether this is their title or a description of the strange objects which levitate in their centre. These unheard-of words originate from the contraction of terms which explain, by way of capricious analogies, the forms which appear in his paintings. Resorting to neologism is not gratuitous. It highlights the need to invent a language and taxonomy to identify something new and unusual. Since they are invented and unconventional terms, paradoxically, instead of defining and clarifying, they reinforce the enigma. Its precision is part of a sleight of hand which accompanies the visual challenge proposed by the artist. That things are simultaneously evident and strange is a fascinating and disturbing discovery – sinister, if we use the accepted translation of Freud’s term Unheimliche-. For discovering the ambiguity and depth arising from the certainty and the obviousness of the visible, art is an extremely efficient tool. And art, like so many things in life, follows a meandering course.
The systematic and analytical function of much abstract art, based on certain formalistic precepts and a rigid internal logic, in accordance with the model which Clement Greenberg observed and theorised upon, could suggest the internal depletion of its possibilities. However, evidence of its consistency throughout the 20th century and the interest it has generated as a creative option for many artists in recent times refute this possibility. The narrative and ornamental tension of John Tremblay, the slightly retro elegance of Tomma Abts (2005 Turner Prize), the rhetorical futurism of Frank Nitsche or the expanded and invasive painting of Katharina Grosse are just a few examples.
The work of Diego Pujal, who has matured in his time and is maturing here and now, in our country, captures this anxiety and possesses a coherence, an originality and certain inherent qualities that make him deserving of our full attention. In the case of Pujal, one is tempted to connect it, genealogically, with that of the Dadaist Jean Arp. This would not be wholly erroneous, given the discovery of the lyricism and the regenerating vitality of form and randomness made by the Alsatian artist. However Pujal is not restricted to prolonging his biomorphic repertoire, like what occurred with a certain affectation during the second avant-garde. On the contrary, he makes specific contributions that are connected directly with the visual culture of the 21st century.
One of the key debates of our era concerns the strategies for managing visual culture. In the age of mass media and the seduction of all things virtual, knowing how we define the real, how we construct language and how we understand codes is a key issue or, at least, one of the most productive and liberating pastimes.
What is fascinating about the paintings of Pujal is that it is very difficult to describe what we are seeing and its essence. In fact, they are not images. They are things, entities: things that exist. The images aim to be the reflex of a reality susceptible to being physically seen. On the other hand, there is every possibility of adherence over the curves and breaks in Pujal’s forms in a fixed reference. What we have before us are not representations. They are existing forms in themselves, outside the duality of physical reality and image. They belong to another existence which is difficult to define. Yet what surprise us, we reiterate, is its presence and its constitution as a being. They are nothing (or nothing clearly identifiable), yet at the same time they are undoubtedly persistent, like natural and/or artificial bodies. Paradoxically, such entities in the paintings of Pujal are possible in bidimensionality, in an ideal and imagined terrain.
In spite of their polished and technical appearance, these works are created, and more importantly conceived, by hand. Pujal starts by sketching on paper with a pencil, until he finds, through a combination of chance, formal logic and accumulated material, a form he is pleased with. It is only when it has been transferred to canvas that he determines its chromatism. Pujal’s work is not based on a computer programme, so commonplace these days among painters, although he may use one at certain stages as a useful tool, for conducting scale or colour trials, for example. Consequently, the solutions he encounters are not determined by conventional computer tools and processes. It is not that employing them lacks validity in artistic terms; on the contrary, they may be of great interest. We want to stress that Pujal’s work if fundamentally created with the body, with the hand, and with the intellectual processing of what can be obtained with the barest resources. The simplicity of the lines and the forms conceal an intriguing complexity. Shadows, cuts, articulations and changes of scale produce a peculiar mixture of tridimensionality and graphic symbols. It is a striking work, often luminous and dazzling with its yellows and fluorescent tones, which include extremely subtle details and gestures. For example, Pujal tends to varnish his works, but does so differently for each one, because the coating is part of the work and may contribute to its nocturnal character or provoke reflexes which make its interpretation more complex and ambiguous. At times he seems to want to concentrate our attention, at others to disperse it.
The work of Diego Pujal cannot be reduced to formalism, or to psychedelic pop, or to an ornamental drift of abstraction, although it may controversially include some of these elements. Pujal has managed to define a discourse which, rather than a style, is a manner of presenting a series of problems of an aesthetic order, stimulating the retina and the intellect. Since I first saw one of his paintings, a couple of years ago, I have been unable to forget them. I recognise them immediately, without doubt. I recognise these images, but I still have not managed to know them in detail. We will have to continue probing their surface.