"----- (--- ----- ------- --- ----.)"

The Blueproject Foundation presents the exhibition "----- (--- ----- ------- --- ----.)", by Pablo Rasgado, the third artist in residency in 2019, which will be on view from April 5 to June 9, 2019, at the Sala Project.

If we could define the work of Pablo Rasgado (Jalisco, Mexico, 1984) as a bricolage process in the manner of Claude Levi-Strauss, we might be right, for the anthropologist claims that “those [messages] which the ‘bricoleur’ collects are, however, ones which have to some extent been transmitted in advance […] it builds up structured sets, not directly with other structured sets but by using the remains and debris of events: in French ‘des bribes et des morceaux’, or odds and ends in English, fossilized evidence of the history of an individual or a society” (Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind). That would make Pablo Rasgado into a meticulous bricoleur, one who doesn’t settle for collecting and piecing together pieces from events past, but endeavours to scrupulously reconfigure a new grammar through cracks in stories that aren’t easy to see. Therefore, his fascination with architecture has nothing to do with ornament or functionality, but rather with negative space, with the hidden sediment behind the walls, with the residue that piles up on the fringes and in nooks and crannies. Between his investigative methods we can find glimpses of modern liquid art as described by Zygmunt Bauman, according to which history is made out of scraps, and the creation and decay of things happen simultaneously, for instance, when the surface of walls is stolen from the streets and carried to art spaces, where they crumble into pieces. Still, unlike “Metzgerian” destruction or Jacques Villeglé’s décollages, which the Polish sociologist described, to Rasgado the city isn’t but a very first instance of search and selection. That is why his walks are closer to those of a picker or glaneur in the vein of Agnès Vardá than to the situationist drifts resulting in improvised collages.

Consequently, to this first stage as a cultural collection we must add an interest to scrutinise structures, be they “social, linguistic or spatial resulting in an organism”, in the artist’s own words. And that is why, even though he initially focused on configurating new volumes and sculptural bodies emerging from previous fragments, the artist actually uses sculpture as a social mirror, regarding it as the scaffolding that conditions our tactics, routines and behaviour policies, which also possesses a unique quality to render invisible and cover up: architecture as a hierarchical system, capable of empowering, raising awareness, concealing and policing.

Which is why in his latest project, "----- (--- ----- ------- --- ----.)", Rasgado resorts to architecture as a pretext to duplicate other systems of power which are, in turn, concealing archetypes of control. Through a selection of classified documents, the artist formally transcribes the fragments that have been blacked out, covered and deleted from secret files, into three-dimensional objects. The censored blocks of text thus transform into volumes revealing seemingly recognizable spaces: fences, doors and windows; alleged passageways that were nullified at the moment of their construction and remain disused vestiges. Architecture, in this case, subtly posits itself as an act of resistance, a social structure in which the public and private spheres enter an unreadable, mystifying tension. Rasgado thus completes, with these architectural jumbles, his role as a bricoleur: he who transforms the residue of contemporary society into new signs.

Text by Andrea Torreblanca