"This is not a book" is not a book, but an exhibition.
Not only that, but an exhibition of De Val's eternal obsessions: pretense, appearances, truth, lies, appropriation, identity and authorship. He who comes across this false book or sees the corresponding exhibition unaware of this sleepless artist's history may be fooled: he is not a conventional figurative painter.
De Val is one of those isolated figures who, indebted to Magritte, Duchamp or Man Ray, share a conceptual vision of art, such as George Brecht, Joan Brossa, Marcel Broodthaers or Marcel Mariën. Each proposes his own vision of the world, but all share a pluridisciplinary attitude in which what matters, essentially, is the concept, the idea. Self-irony, a sense of humor and a very healthy desire to confuse categories are also features common to all of them. In this exhibition, De Val has chosen to use "traditional" techniques and pictorial media in order to, as Foucault would say, reveal to what extent the invisibility of the visible is invisible. In other words, what fiction is made of.
Fiction... Fictions: Borges1. If Borges, in "La Biblio-teca de Babel" [Babel's Library], refers to the Universe as a Library, De Val, convinced of the metaphorical and linguistic capacity of painting, interprets the latter as the Universe, and therefore the Library. The Library, the books, are his metaphor for the world. They are, in short, a metaphor for painting, a metaphor for Art.
Books tell stories: their spines suggest them. De Val paints book spines, but his books are not books because they were never written. They are only spines, painted spines. Therefore, as books they are fiction. However, they are indeed stories, just not written, only painted. But isn't it the same thing? Do we not often speak of "reading" a painting as we would a written text?
Let us reflect on Gadamer's idea that one begins to "decipher" a painting the same way one would decipher a written text: attempting to reconstruct the picture by reading it, as it were, word for word, until it all finally converges in the image of the painting, where the meaning evoked in it becomes present. All works allow the beholder a certain degree of slack, of space to play, where he must fill in the blanks.
The function of the concept is therefore to create a sort of sounding board to articulate the play of the imagination. And what does De Val propose, if not a game, an irony? With his works, he releases the viewer from contemplative passivity. He manages to make us, as spectators or "readers", participate in the completion of the esthetic object. In the words of one of the seven readers who appear as characters in second-to-last chapter of Italo Calvino's book "Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore": "The moment that counts the most for me is that preceding the reading. Sometimes just the title is enough to ignite within me the desire for a book that may not exist. (...) In short, if it does not take much to set your imagination rolling, for me it takes even less: the promise of reading".
The archives, libraries, encyclopedias composed by De Val contain deliberately unreal books, in imitation of those other false books that fill and decorate the shelves of so many alleged libraries,like that library suitable for Irnerio2, the "non-lettered" kind, made up of books whose spines only contain the symbols used by opticians to examine the eyes of illiterate patients, which is not without its own paradox: the uselessness of a library for those who do not know how to read.
Paradoxically, in this case even the lack of knowledge takes up space*: the same space as the knowledge alluded to in this picture's complementary painting, the "Enciclopedia del Arte" [Encyclopedia of Art]. With this work, De Val seems to refer us to the utopian total work of art, eternal aspiration, the impossible dream of all artists: to create a work that can be the only work encompassing all, because in it the whole is exhausted.
Presumably, an encyclopedia of art contains -or should contain- everything relating to Art. By painting it, De Val magnifies this idea of everything by making the encyclopedia itself a painting, by making it Art itself.
Just as Pirandello theatricalizes theater, Calvino novelizes the novel or Mompou musicalizes music, here De Val represents the means of representation through the media itself. He paints the history of art, he paints art, he paints painting. His painting is about painting and the painter is the painted. As shown in "Autobiografía en amarillo" [Auto-biography in yellow], "Casi todos italianos y excelentes pintores" [Almost all Italian and excellent painters], "Cómo pintar en 7 tomos" [How to paint in 7 volumes] or "No me lo tengan en cuenta y otros grandes libros" [Don«t hold it against me and other great books], works in which De Val once again exercises his self-awareness, in other words, irony with regard to his own work, revealing that it is the awareness of the lie itself that grants truth to the work, and that "modern self-irony, destined to subvert certainties until they are reduced to pretense, is also a pretense"3.
However, the fable does not stop here, but continues on the back of the pictures. On this usually immaculate and invisible side, De Val plays, entertains himself, amuses us and invites us to play with him. By showing us the back, he turns us into accomplices: we share the secret hidden behind the picture. Here continues his reflection on identity, authorhood, appropriation and pretense. It is also here that De Val places the finishing touch on his "stories": the title. Essential to his works, it suggests new "readings" while also revealing his ironic and critical interpretation of history, culture and the passage of time.
As an epilogue, a prologue by Borges4: "It is a laborious and impoverishing act of madness to compose vast books; to spread over five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly expressed orally in just a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that such books already exist and offer a summary, a comment" or, I would add, "a painting".
Esther Montoriol
(Translation from spanish)
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