Untitled

I S I D R O TA S C Ó N
A mi madre
y a mi amiga Kely, in memorian
ÍNDICE
Presidente:
Manuel Baltar
Coordinación de Montaxe e Manipulación:
Manuel Pérez Cid
Diputado de Cultura:
Avelino García Ferradal
Textos:
© Alberto Martín
Director Centro Cultural:
Francisco González Bouzán
Traducción:
Josephine Watson
Administración e Xestión de fondos:
Salomé Caamaño
Diseño:
Manuel Fernández (MF)
DL: OU-56/2104
© Deputación Ourense
Edita:
Elixir
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Notas biográficas
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English version
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ELIXIR
Papel baritado HMPR-B
2014
3 × 4 cm
(Excepto p. 12 : 4 × 3 cm)
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ISIDRO TASCÓN
Exposiciones individuales
(selección)
1991-96
Licenciado en Bellas Artes,
Universidad de Salamanca.
2014
Centro Cultural Marcos Valcárcel,
Diputación de Ourense.
1996-98
Cursos de Doctorado, Facultad
de Bellas Artes, Universidad
Complutense de Madrid.
2009
Real Academia de España, Roma.
Galería Vértice, Oviedo.
DA2, Domus Artium 2002. Berlín Palast. Salamanca.
2000-01
Magister en Museografía y
Exposiciones, Universidad
Complutense de Madrid.
2008
Constelación Arte, Junta de
Castilla y León, itinerante.
2004
Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos, León.
Galerie Ernst Hilger, Viena.
2001
Galería Edurne, Madrid.
Exposiciones colectivas
(selección)
2006
ARCO ‘06, Ministerio de Cultura, Madrid.
2005
ARCO ‘05, Galería Vértice, Madrid.
2004
ARCO ‘04, Galería Vértice, Madrid.
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2003
ARCO ‘03, Galería Vértice, Madrid.
2002
ARCO ‘02, Galería Vértice, Madrid.
2001
ARCO ‘01, Galería Vértice,
Madrid.
Becas y Premios
2004
Beca de Artes Plásticas del Colegio de España en Paris, Ministerio de Cultura, Madrid.
2002
Beca de Artes Plásticas de la Academia de España en Roma,
Ministerio de Asuntos
Exteriores, Madrid.
Primer Premio, V Premio Carriegos de Pintura, León.
Premio de Grabado, Asociación de Amigos MGEC, Marbella.
2001
Beca de Artes Plásticas, Casa de Velázquez, Madrid.
Adquisición de obra, Junta de Castilla y León.
Adquisición de Instalación en el Certamen Autonómico de Artes
Plásticas 2001, Junta de Castilla y León.
Adquisición de Fotografía en el Certamen Autonómico de
Fotografía 2001, Junta de Castilla y León.
Mención de Honor de Escultura, Generación 2001, Premios y
Becas de Arte, Caja Madrid, Madrid.
2000
Primer Premio de Pintura,
I Premio de pintura Joven, ILC, León.
Beca de creación Pilar Juncosa en los talleres de obra gráfica,
Fundación Pilar i Joan Miró, Palma de Mallorca.
Adquisición de Pintura en el Certamen Autonómico de Artes
Plásticas 2000, Junta de Castilla y León.
Beca del Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores para realizar estudios
Artísticos en la Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst, Basilea, Suiza.
Beca Formación de Personal Investigador, UCM.
Adquisición de Escultura, Instituto Leonés de Cultura, León.
1999
Premio de Litografía, Certamen Gráfico de Jóvenes Creadores, Casa de la Moneda, Madrid.
Adquisición de Pintura en el Certamen Autonómico de Artes
Plásticas 99, Junta de Castilla y León.
1998
Finalista Premio Caja España de Pintura.
1997
Adquisición de Escultura y
Técnicas de Estampación, Certamen Autonómico de Artes Plásticas 97, Junta de Castilla y León.
1996
Adquisición de Escultura y
Técnicas de Estampación, Certamen Autonómico de Artes Plásticas 96, Junta de Castilla y León.
Finalista Premio Caja España de Pintura.
1995
Adquisición de Escultura en el Certamen Autonómico de Artes
Plásticas 95, Junta de Castilla y León.
Adquisición de obra por la
Diputación de León con motivo de la Muestra de Grabado Leonés Contemporáneo.
1992
Primer Premio de Pintura,
I Certamen Provincial de Arte Joven, León.
Obra en colecciones
Colección de Arte
Contemporáneo, Junta de Castilla y León.
Diputación de León.
DA2. Domus Artium 2002, Salamanca.
Junta de Castilla y León.
Casa de Velázquez, Madrid.
Calcografía Nacional, Madrid.
Colección Esencias, Ernesto Ventós, Barcelona.
Colegio de Arquitectos, Delegación de León.
Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid.
Fundación Casa de la Moneda, Madrid.
Fundación CEIM, Madrid.
Fundación Pilar i Joan Miró, Palma de Mallorca.
Museo de Grabado Español Contemporáneo, Marbella.
Construcciones Carriegos, León.
Museo Municipal de Madrid,
Colección de Arte Contemporáneo, Madrid.
Real Academia de España, Roma.
Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, Madrid.
Tesorería de la Seguridad Social, León.
Ministerio de Cultura, Madrid.
Ministerio de Justicia, delegación de León.
ENGLISH VERSION
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THE INAPPARENT AND THE ORDER OF MEANING
In a former chemist’s shop in Orense that is now closed to the public, Isidro Tascón has found
the perfect setting for the execution of his latest project. A series of small format photographs,
painstakingly framed, a set of metal engravings derived from the small pictures, and the installation
of the old chemist’s shelf in the actual exhibition spac us works, some of them carefully resumed or
reformulated, but it also explores new problems, establishes new references and seeks new solutions.
No doubt the criteria governing the reception of the work by Isidro Tascón over the course of his career
have been considerably consistent, and have enabled him to progressively and clearly define a series of
constant factors that distinguished his work from very early on. We shall examine these factors, in an
inevitably simplified manner, in order to establish a starting point for Elixir. One outstanding feature
that draws our attention in the critical texts dedicated to his oeuvre is the correspondence between
some of the qualities and categories he introduces and brings into play.1
Most of his production has been broadly ascribed to a field that no longer has clear-cut boundaries,
that of painting, thus emphasising his transformations of pictorial matter and plastic surfaces, the
qualities and conditions of his materials, his ongoing reflection on colour, line and geometry, and
on the tension and intersection between materials and surfaces. Tascón’s oeuvre has generically been
attributed to the realms of abstraction, revealing a consistent task of assimilation and reformulation
of pre-existing formal parameters, especially Minimalism, but also of contemplative painting and
certain attitudes adopted by the avant-garde trends of the period between the two world wars. Silence,
calmness, serenity, austerity, lightness, melancholy, deceleration, meditation and, occasionally,
spirituality, are terms used to describe and qualify his proposals, thus implicitly highlighting the
metaphorical intensity of his production.
Records and photographic supports were introduced in his work in 2006, in particular with the series
entitled Palast that is a part of the broader project Heimweh (Nostalgia), adding further constants
to the critical reception of his work. The specific pictures of Palast, taken in the Palast der Republik
building that had formerly housed the government of the German Democratic Republic while it was
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being dismantled due to the degeneration of the cement used in its construction, and those he took
in Berlin the same year, considered as a photographic journey, favour the emergence of continuous
allusions to ideas such as nostalgia, ruin, time, the past and history in the studies dedicated to his
work. No doubt the thematic referentiality of photography contributes to a great extent to this
progressive displacement of the perception, analysis and categorisation of this set of works, although
much of what we have previously mentioned is also applicable here: the reference to Minimalism,
abstraction, the interest in line and colour, peace and quiet. In their use of photography, both Palast
and a considerable number of the images of Berlin reveal a conscious displacement of interest
from the documentary register to issues of a compositional and pictorial nature. In his shots of the
former headquarters of the German Democratic Republic, in which he plays with the possibilities
of photography, we discover the same line of investigation that has dominated Tascón’s career. The
centre of these works is not so much that which disappears, time and evocation, as the finding of a
setting, a reality that provides picturality in the dismantling process.2 The framing and fragmentation
of the real by the photographic construct the surface of the picture, finding and separating geometric
structures, planes, lines and intersections; glass is tinted with colour and is transformed into a space
for figuration, while the tension between modern and traditional architecture becomes a fruitful
formal game. The pictures taken in Berlin are equally concerned with composition and chromaticism.
The interpretation of urban space becomes a pictorial dialogue with the conditions of reality. The city
is inhabited by patches and spots of colour: points of artificial light, objects, signs and advertisements,
urban furniture, buildings, walls and interiors. Formal games succeed one another, particularly those
based on the repetition of a motif, in buildings, on the ground, on rooftops, in industrial areas or
cemeteries. Movement and loss of focus also become a lesson well learnt, the tools of painting.
From this point of view, Elixir is not only a project that furthers Tascón’s interest in photography
but also delves into the relationship between the pictorial and the photographic, as in the case of the
works we have just seen, by concentrating on composition. The nature of this project is determined
by several of the ‘gestures’ or actions made by the artist in front of the stage that represents the former
chemist’s shop. To begin with, his refusal to document the space again, preferring instead to isolate
a small fragment of it (in this case a part of one of the shelves). The chosen fragment, that barely
measures two metres by two metres, then becomes the support and surface of the picture. Similarly,
the chemist’s shop is transformed into the artist’s studio. The second gesture consists in taking the old
items on the shelves (a number of glass and porcelain containers, pestles and mortars) and using them
for creating compositional games before arranging them in different sequences on the shelves. The
third gesture involves turning some of the containers around, hiding their labels or the indications
of their contents to reveal their substance. The last gesture leaves a trace of the artist’s intervention,
for he places new objects on the shelves—several present-day plastic jars that provide a formal and
temporal counterpoint. These actions, that have no descriptive or documentary intention, are of a
compositional nature, for they concern the placing of items in order, according to their meaning.3
Once again, picturality is provided by the items found by Tascón—whether they be the shelf with
its play of horizontal and vertical lines that are lost beyond the frame, thereby emphasising the idea
of the construction of the picture, or the painting of the wood and the touches of colour provided
by the objects and the substances in the glass containers. This layout of materials, their successive
rearrangements, changes in the framing and pinpointing of details give shape to a photographic series
consisting of twenty-six images that gradually construct artistic meaning. The choice of motif and its
treatment and interpretation once again establish obvious connections with various referents. The most
immediate of these is the painting of Giorgio Morandi, both on account of its serene, contemplative
attitude and of the Italian artist’s compositional work starting from practically the same elements, on
a plane and a ground that bear subtle resemblances, and their resulting chromatic articulations. Yet
Tascón’s oeuvre also finds echoes and links with the history of photography, as exemplified by two
distinct references: some of the illustrations from The Pencil of Nature by William Henry Fox Talbot,
and some of the photographs taken of Prada window displays by Andreas Gursky. Both examples
reveal the uniqueness and coherence of Tascón’s proposals. Talbot took three photographs entitled
Articles of China, Articles of Glass and A Scene in a Library to illustrate The Pencil of Nature, all three
inspired by a series of items placed on a shelf. In Talbot’s comments on these images he refers to several
basic issues: to compositional work, to the ‘arrangement’, to the descriptive ability of photography, to
the different qualities and problems of the materials when it came to their developing and printing.
Beyond the interest aroused by the concomitance of the chosen motif it is important to consider the
composition, the description and material quality of the objects. Talbot’s pictures trigger a series of
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considerations that are only partly related to the specific subject of the photographs, reflecting the
early importance of the problems concerning photographic composition and materiality. Tascón thus
connects with essential areas of photography, although he makes a radical decision that goes against
the descriptive ability of the medium, situating his proposal in a realm that is to a certain extent
foreign to the actual procedure. His decision was to aggressively reduce the size of the works to three
by four centimetres, and frame them to highlight the objectual quality of the photographs. The size
of the pictures hinders the development and observance of the descriptive faculty of photography. By
withdrawing this prospect, the perception of the beholder moves towards another pattern and order
of meaning.
But Elixir goes one step further: Tascón transforms some of the photographs, thirteen to be precise,
into engravings on brass measuring four by six centimetres. First he makes a drawing from the
photographic image, which is then engraved in a perspex die that, in turn, becomes a template for
etching the drawing on the brass—successive changes of scale, from the actual size of the registered
image to its reduction in the photograph, before being slightly enlarged in the print, and successive
changes of support that remind us once again of Talbot’s efforts and reflections. On the one hand, the
dialogue established between drawing and photography, which is as old as the medium itself and yet
still so contemporary, and on the other his pioneering development of the process of photographic
engraving. The problems entailed by changing or transferring supports expose and explore the traces
of materiality underlying each medium and procedure, emphasising the ambivalent and inapparent
nature of the mechanic, the automatic and the technological (photography, engraving), and examining
the dialogue and tension between the manual (drawing) and the mechanic.4
In the mid-nineties Andreas Gursky produced a series of works inspired by Prada window displays.
These works showed shop windows with huge spotless shelves that were either empty or else filled
with homogeneous mass-produced consumer goods. Gursky too sets up a dialogue between the
pictorial and the photographic, and is also inclined towards Minimalist abstraction and the schematic
reduction of shapes, repetition and serialisation. The large formats of his works, along with his
digital manipulation of images and the scenes he manages to construct (only to destroy once the
shot has been taken) are well known to the extent that they have become referents. Indeed, some of
the most prominent features in certain contemporary photography are precisely large-scale printing
techniques, digital manipulation and construction of scenes and mock-ups. Contrarily, the drastic
reduction in scale in Tascón’s series is extremely significant, as are the traces of irregularity, materiality
and craft in this work, as opposed to the preference for perfect finishes. Along these lines, the decision
to include the actual shelf on which the pictures have been taken in the Elixir exhibition space is a
further example of resistance and individuality before certain strategies. The direct presence of the
spatial reference of the photographs restores sizes, repositions perception and once again alters the
order of meaning. To a certain degree, this presence of the real establishes—or perhaps it would
be more fitting to say re-establishes and makes visible—the link between image and medium, i.e.
between the image and the respective procedure that has generated it.
Isidro Tascón, speaking of his own oeuvre, appeals to a game of opposites, to a series of dualities
between the corporeal and the spiritual, between body and soul, heaven and earth. In reference to
Elixir, he defines his proposal and choice of title as the spiritual quintessence, a remedy, an elixir for
life and for the spirit. This is of course a metaphor that attempts to speak of art itself, of continuities
between the material and the spiritual, of the spiritual elucidation of materiality, of the revelation
of the inapparent,5 elements that also clearly refer to his own creative project. Javier Hernando has
correctly defined the images generated by his work as spiritual laxatives. Isidro Tascón’s appeal to elixir
and remedy, approaching the pictorial in the context of a chemist’s shop, is perfectly and explanatorily
echoed by Jean Clair, who describes how colour, chroma, was defined as a remedy in ancient times by
Aristotle, Theophrastus and Dioscorides. Powders and pigments, unguents and cosmetics: the world
of colour belongs to the realm of the ministrations of body and soul.6
Alberto Martín
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NOTES
1. The following summary of the reception of Isidro
Tascón’s work stems from my reading of various critical
essays written for various exhibition catalogues by
authors Javier Hernando Carrasco, David Barro, F. Javier
Panera Cuevas, José Guirao, Fernando Sánchez Calderón
and Rubén Suárez.
2. This idea and the term picturality (picturalité) are
taken from Jean-Marc Huitorel’s essay ‘Sobre la pintura
y lo pictórico,’ published in Afinidades electivas,
Lleida, Ajuntament de Lleida / Centre d’Art la Panera,
2008, p. 102.
3. See Philippe Sers, Vérité en art, Éditions de la Villete,
Paris, p. 55.
4. This reflection stems from the suggestive article
by Richard Shiff, ‘The Photographic Soul’, published
in David Green (Ed.), Where Is The Photograph?,
Photoworks, Brighton 1999.
5. Philippe Sers, op. cit.
6. Jean Clair, Éloge du visible: Fondements imaginaires de
la science, Gallimard, Paris, 1996.