FIELDS

FIELDS 26 : All Realities Co-Existing Everywhere Forever. 2018

Off-White

An essay by Enrique Giner de los Ríos, for the catalogue of the Fields exhibition at Sala Amós Salvador

Color is the mother tongue of the unconscious mind.
Carl Gustav Jung

The sea is dark like wine, just like sheep and oxen, the sky is bronze colored , clouds are purple, and green are nightingales and honey (always according to The Iliad and The Odyssey). Homer, besides being witty, lived in a Greece with a limited palette of colors, at least as far as vocabulary is concerned. Empédocles, presocratic philosopher and great theorist of color, had established an order in which tonalities were divided into four large groups: white, black, red and yellow (and what derived therefrom). There was no blue in Ancient Greece.

William Gladstone, in the nineteenth century, was the first to notice the strange analogies Homer used to describe the color of things. Gladstone, in addition to being prime minister of Great Britain in four occasions, published an important book tittled Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, where a careful study about the use of the color in the works of the Greek poet is made. In it, he concludes that the Greeks saw only in black and white, with small touches of red. They had not physically developed the ability to see colors. This cruel theory had some resonance in the Victorian period due to of the importance of the author and the affluence in his explanation. Fortunately, over time it was found that Homer was not color blind or his people suffered any kind of visual atrophy. They were able to see the same colors as us even if they named or related them to different things. The names of a color often described texture, temperature or light. Far from being conceived as a mere surface, color evoked sensations and was related to certain spirituality.

Other civilizations of the time also witnessed green dawns, horses with violet mane like rainbows or apples, silver lakes and other chromatic aberrations that I envy deeply. The scarcity of names was common among them, as was the logic with which they arose. This was declared by the German philosopher Lazarus Geiger, inspired by the work of Gladstone. The same tones are repeated in almost all cultures practically in the same order of appearance: first the black and white (light and dark), then the red (blood and easy to produce dyes), and finally yellow and green (the colors of vegetation). Thinking of blue was a luxury. The blue of the sky was thus conceived only by the Egyptians, who had a great mastery of color and chemistry, which led them to create a blue pigment considered the first synthetic dye in history.

When a color doesn’t have a name it doesn’t exist. The designation of a color and the perception we have of it are not necessarily linked, but having names helps us to define a spectrum. It also restricts us and subjects us to an imposed order, to a convention. Sensitive observation, poetry, altered states of consciousness, and Homer's comparisons may perhaps save us from this yoke. Freed us every so often from norms that uniform our perception, that mutilate the imagination of children who color blue clouds on *bond* white skies, timidly inverting the order to save paint and time.

The world is governed by great abstractions, we understand space in three dimensions thanks to Euclid. Once we learn to see space as a composition of two-dimensional planes generated by an infinite succession of lines created by points without any dimension, there is no turning back. It will be very difficult to interact with space intuitively ever again. Euclidean geometry helps us understand something that does not exist, while denying other perceptual realities. Sometimes conventions work as social norms, they help us interacting as individuals in society, but they prevent us from wearing white shoes in the autumn, running with scissors, disguising ourselves as an animal to go to the cinema on Monday, or eating a mango with our hands.

The chromatic spectrum has grown along with its names. In the 20th century we learned the unmistakable shimmering tones of Kodachrome, the famous film for slides created by Kodak in the 1930s; In the 60's Pantone was invented, the main color identification system that year after year tries to impose a new trend tonality with an absurd name. Four years ago we met the Vantablack, the blackest black, capable of absorbing up to 99.9% of the light, making any object painted with this pigment look like a dark hole in space; and we had never seen as many pink hues as in this decade, or so many old and new names fighting to be the ultimate tone (champagne pink, rose pink, salmon pink, COS pink…). Blue has long been the favorite color among the majorities and the amount of tonalities is overwhelming. Indigo is artificially produced in vast quantities, and is one of the most harmful water contaminants.

Ana Montiel's relationship with color oscillates between absolute erudition and primitivism, between the complex and the simple. The relationship is as childish as well-educated, with precepts of a man of science, of a witch, of make believe, or none of the above. Ana knows perfectly the principles of the subtractive and additive synthesis of color, recites from memory fashionable tones in the world and her changing selection of personal favorites, she dresses in different shades of black, creates her own pigments using ancestral techniques, grinding chalk or using new materials, a slightly different yellow than what you expected can ruin your day, know the ideal combination to print a deep black in CMYK, and most likely calibrate the screen of your computer. I would never discuss whether a photograph was taken at Kodachrome, Fujichrome or Ektachrome, and much less about the vagueness of a car's color. Biotechnology is one of the last obsessions of the artist, is waiting for a chlorophyll droplets that allow temporary night vision and what is necessary to become a tetrachromatic human, with four different types of cone cell in the retina making it able to distinguish, among other things, up to 10 tones in the rainbow.

Her perception of the chromatic spectrum is not restricted by names and conventions. Ana does not perceive color as a solid surface, she associates without any prejudices all the different tones and gradients to sensations or moments, to emotions, or to objects without a name. Layers of hues run through her canvases like white noise, emerging from the depths to disappear again, generating different narratives for each viewer. One can spend hours standing in front of one of her Fields, waiting for the cloud of color that created all that frenzy a few minutes ago to happen again, in the same way you wait at a large aquarium for the mother walrus and her babies to swim again in front of you while they greet you.

Ana's intuition about the use of color is influenced by the writings of Josef Albers, by psychology, by science and its advances, by Derek Jarman's essays, by esoteric readings, by what she hears on the street, by her obsession with synesthesia, altered states of consciousness, the aurora and the harsh midday light in her house in Tepoztlan. The sea and the sheep are dark like wine if she so wishes. And the sunsets are off-white.

Enrique Giner de los Rios

FIELDS 42 : Altered States of Openness. 2017

FIELDS 61 : Presence is Expansion. 2018

FIELDS 36 : Future Echoes. 2017

Fields exhibition at Sala Amós Salvador ( 2018, Spain )

FIELDS 37 : El triunfo de la luz. 2017

FIELDS 51 : Inner Atlas. 2018

FIELDS 15 : Fragments of a Non-Existent Past. 2018

FIELDS 43 : Uncharted Territories. 2018

FIELDS 5 : Opening of the Senses. 2018

A Tribute to the Non-Material

Nikola Tesla said that whenever science begins to study non-physical phenomena it will progress in a decade more than in all previous centuries.

I often have the recurring feeling that we humans miss out on many things by perceiving and measuring everything in such a materialistic way (quantifying and testing as was done in ancient past). Some branches of modern science have been trying to dismantle the monopoly of such materialistic practices for decades, with ideas that state that the reality we perceive is a mere collective hallucination and that what we understand as matter is not really solid but just energy in motion. Solidity is an illusion, but since our senses are so "hyper-realistic", the perception we have of our environment through them is manifested in a way that makes us feel it as undoubtedly solid.

Richard Feynman (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1965) believed that it is much more interesting to live admitting that we do not know, than to live believing we have answers that could be incorrect. He admitted having approximate answers, possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about a variety of issues, but he was not completely sure of anything. He was not afraid of not knowing things, of feeling lost in a mysterious universe of which he did not know its purpose; you could say he was comfortable in uncertainty. Even though I may not be as comfortable with the perplexity of the universe as Feynmann was, often, the search for the unknown causes me to find myself wrapped in a feeling of ecstasy and a sense of adventure so stimulating that they make me recognize them as the engines that keep me moving. To dream with colors that I’ve never met, to learn about all the possible disciplines or to try and translate ideas or perceptions that flirt with the ineffable to an artistic work; everything is an excuse to learn and find meaning. I feel that the road is the most important thing, the process. The works work as witnesses of this research expedition.

THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE SENSES

Why does something have more credibility if we see or touch it than when we feel it? And what about the number of times we thought we saw something that in the end was not there, or heard something that was impossible? Why is it that we give so much credibility to our five senses, when neuroscience tells us again and again that what we perceive are pure conjectures and impressions of the most subjective? Whenever we are perceiving, in reality what we are doing is creating (we influence the result in an active way with our cognitive process). Would it help to alleviate this dissonance if we expanded the categorization of our senses by adding an additional pair based on feeling and intuition? I think it would be similar to when our language evolves and expands to express ourselves in a richer and more precise way.

What is it that makes us believe in some things and not in others? Would you deny the existence of love due to its imprecise nature and how difficult it is to carry out a measurement of it? Isn’t it a little hypocrite from our part that emotions are considered subjective but the senses with which we perceive are not? Does it makes us restless to realize nothing is physical, and everything is just an energy network? Sometimes, when I reflect on these issues, I get a knot in my stomach and feel a bit of vertigo, the abyss of infinite possibilities that I begin to ponder is overwhelming and exciting in equal parts.

There is a multiverse theory that states that this reality that we experience is a mere virtual simulation. Simulation? Is the squirrel that I see climbing up the guava tree in the garden a mirage? Science says that the squirrel, the guava, and myself are simulations. None of us are material and we are only expressions of energy in motion, comparable to the one we can live with a next-generation video game in which one uses one of those virtual reality caps. This theory is just as farfetched as any we can have about the reality we experience. Reflecting calmly, everything is just as speculative as mysterious when one is inquiring into the nature of this experience that we live. All illusions, from the magical chiaroscuro of a full moon night in the desert, to the avocado-taco that I am about to eat, I am co-creating everything I perceive.

Fields is a tribute to the intangible, a personal respite in the dictatorship of this illusory material world. A reflection about what possibly exists even if I am not aware. I feel it's like reaching out for something or someone you probably never get to know. Fields is an exercise in faith disguised as a chromatic adventure.

STABILITY AND SOLIDITY, TWO SIDES OF THE SAME MIRAGE

For me, the idea of security is almost as elusive as the idea of solidity. What seems immovable one day, the next will be just a memory. Life communicated this to me loud and clear during my teenage years with the illness and passing of my late mother. What seemed the most stable pillar in my life, threatened with becoming history. After the shock, the denial, the crisis and the all the crying, the pseudo-zen reaction that I managed to take, to get on with life, was a carpe diem attitude with which I embraced every day as if it were the last. Squeezing possibilities and experiences as much as possible.

Today, despite missing this wonderful being every day, the feeling of gratitude I have for her and the situation is much greater than the sadness. So much to thank my mother today and always, so much to thank life! The learning and growth that such an experience grants is priceless.

Attachment brings sadness. If we had been educated with a different approach, one based on detachment and the acknowledgement of impermanence, I feel that we could be handling better the ups and downs of life. Enjoying things while they are there, without clinging, with a spirit of profound awe and gratitude regarding the mystery of existence.

The feeling of stability is highly seductive, I consider it similar to that of solidity. Both sell you an idea of security that we all crave and they are like two faces of the same mirage, intangible and powerful.

UNCERTAINTY AS A KEY TO EVERYTHING

Denying something deprives us to understand it, but doubting it opens us to questioning it, reflecting it and maybe even deciphering it. Our daily life is still ruled by the materialistic practices of Isaac Newton’s era. Attentive to the mechanical and quantitative, focused on the subject (what we see and can measure). Any glimmer of certainty of Newton's proposal was brought down with the advent of quantum physics in modern science. Why do we not incorporate the vagueness of the latter into our daily life? I think being comfortable in uncertainty is about the most powerful gifts we can make ourselves as a species. Not classifying and quantifying ideas or situations constantly, but living with them with respect and curiosity, wanting to understand but accepting that there will always be much more that one will not understand.

Carl Sagan said that we give meaning to our world with the courage of the questions we ask and with the depth of our answers. I feel that questioning our structures and not taking things for granted is imperative for our existence. To be able to slander certainty and embrace a nebula of questions with an inquisitive mind and an almost puerile enthusiasm. To engage in a conversation with doubt to see it become an ocean of possibilities, while our spirits dance lightly as they are counseled by the pattern of non-solidity.

Uncertainty as a possibility, and us being able to transcend the canons of what we currently consider reality, embracing the unknown and becoming one with it.

Ana Montiel, 2018

Fields exhibition at Sala Amós Salvador ( 2018, Spain )

Besides experimenting with altered states of consciousness Ana Montiel’s procedures involve, as basic tools, questions that arise from different subjects such as: metaphysics, phenomenology, the philosophies found in the Hindu Upanishads, or the buddhist doctrine of impermanence.
Human perception, its particularities, and the subjective burden associated with it is one of Ana’s most recurrent themes. In the scope of her own research, for Ana Montiel the act of perceiving, at the neuronal level, always implies creating. An act of pure creation where the artist considers that the senses, being the receptors that allow us to perceive the environment, "invent" knowledge from external parameters. With all this in mind, she deduces that colors as such do not exist, since we can conceptualize them simply as energetic vibrations that our brain translates into tonalities: something that the artist considers absolutely magical and that gives rise to an extensive reflection on the subject whose pictorial representation culminates in her ‘Fields’ series, whose non-restrictive approach aims to expand her own consciousness and that of the viewer.

Susana Baldor, curator of the exhibition