Iñaki Bonillas
Double Chiaroscuro
Art Basel 41 – Art Statements
Hall 1.0, booth S5
Since his early works in 1999, Mexican artist Iñaki Bonillas has been establishing a relationship with photography in his oeuvre. With a regard for the aesthetics and the conceptual practices of the sixties and seventies, Iñaki Bonillas has been gradually isolating the constituent elements of photography and connecting them with other procedures. Since 2003, when Bonillas introduced into his work the vast photographic archive of his grandfather, J. R. Plaza, he has been working on different projects that link elements together that seem a priori incompatible: on the one hand a personal, biographical narrative that consists of private anecdotes and emotions, and on the other a quasi-scientific element of compilation, classifying, and archiving.
For Art Basel 41, Bonillas presents a new project, Double Chiaroscuro. The project is composed of 4 different pieces in different media, each of them developed from one single image taken from J. R. Plaza’s Archive. In Double Chiaroscuro, Bonillas plays with the idea of exploring the possibility, not only of creating a new set of images, through juxtaposition, recontextualization or any other way of reinterpretation of the original source, but of arriving to a whole new archive. More than the mere flexibility and reactivation of appropriated images, the purpose then is to show how images are capable of giving birth to distinct visual realms.
The image at issue is a portrait photograph of the great-grandfather of the artist that happens to show the remains of an old grid, once traced with the aid of a pencil all over the picture (with the idea, it seems, of helping someone to copy the portrait by following the squares, also numbered with a pencil). This given quality, of the picture as grid, allows the artist to work with 104 images (the ones produced by the pencil partition) instead of one. From now on, those 104 elements are not just fragments of a bigger image, but images in its own right, susceptible of being used to create, in turn, more images. By renouncing to the figurativeness of the photograph (i.e., to the possibility of subject recognition), Bonillas is able to search for different ways of displaying the new, and now abstract archive (deceived here and there by an eye or an ear). But the images at this point are no longer photographic either, they have become indiscernible. Bonillas works from this neutrality and essays with four different techniques and methods.
It is important to mention that the original photograph has another peculiarity: it was taken in such a way that a double chiaroscuro (double light-dark) was accidentally, and paradoxically, formed: one at the background of the image (from dark to light), and the other one on the face of the man portrayed (from light to dark). This luminous phenomenon of crossed axes, gives the artist the opportunity to work with a richness of grey tones: intense, dull, shaded, lustrous; almost all the tones of the Zone System1.
The first of the lines of approach, Double Chiaroscuro # 1, deals with with the original double chiaroscuro, reproducing it (or rather making a parody of it) using the images of the new archive as tiles. Two new composition are built by means of rearranging each of the tiles in order to reach, first, a degrade from luminosity to darkness, and then, by inverting the values, one from darkness to luminosity.
A second attempt, Double Chiaroscuro # 5, emphasizes the chiaroscuro by means of full contrast. In a set of 52 sequenced prints, the darkest of the tiled fragments is paired off with the lightest one (each one placed on its original position), and so on in 52 steps, until the light and shade interplay recedes, because the pairs that come last present no contrast at all. The resulting arrangement which may at first glance ressemble a mathematical-linguistic-musical coded construction, evokes minimalism in its repetition, serialism and reductionism, and creates a space in which form might be able to receive new readings. This piece also echoes earlier Bonillas’ works such as Thought Figures, 2008, or the drawing series Naufragio en silencio, 2007.
The artist also explores the possibility of arriving at the original composition (i.e., the original picture) by using the tiles as stills of a film: Double Chiaroscuro # 6. In an animation frame by frame, each tile consecutively appears on the screen to occupy the place where it used to be in the original arrangement, in order to slowly give birth to the portrait, which is build in a succession that follows the logic of the chiaroscuro. By way of building an image that makes itself more discernible with each new tile that comes to the screen, the film shows how the double chiaroscuro acts. The work reminds of an old piece of experimental cinema by its abstract nature (even when the material is figurative: the treatment is clearly indifferent to subject matter), and the circularity of its narrative. At the end, the image begins to disappear gradually in a way that reverts the process of the previous chiaroscuro formation.
Double Chiaroscuro closes with Double Chiaroscuro # 7, a work that has the value of a re-enactment. Once the original image has been split in 104 parts, ordered, disordered and assembled in multiple fashions, it is reconstructed by a process of copy. By using the 104 parts in the grid, an anonymous draftsman will produce a drawing of that original portrait photograph.
In Double Chiaroscuro, one more time, Bonillas reclaims photography’s most fleeting and marginal aspects and obsessively explores the elements that characterise it as a technique: the qualities of its light, the exposure, the possibility of reproduction. The work also points out and important aspect in Bonillas’ practise: it shows that method comes to the surface as a meaningful element within the artist’s discourse.
Double Chiaroscuro is composed of:
Reprint of found photograph taken from the J.R Plaza Archive
Digital print on cotton paper
19,5 x 14,8 cm. Unique
Double Chiaroscuro # 1, 2008
2 digital prints on cotton paper, 135 x 90 cm each
Unique
Double Chiaroscuro # 5, 2010
52 digital prints on cotton paper, 33,2 x 22 cm each
Unique
Double Chiaroscuro # 6, 2010
104 digital stills transferred to 16 mm film. Unique
Double Chiaroscuro # 7, 2010
104 pencil drawings on cotton paper, ca. 10 x 10 cm each
Overall ca. 135 x 85 cm. Unique
PROJECTESD
Ptge. Mercader, 8 baixos 1
08008 Barcelona
Spain
Director: Silvia Dauder
T: 0034 934881360
F: 0034 934881360
info [at] projectesd.com
Image above:
Reprint of found photograph taken from the J.R Plaza Archive
Digital print on cotton paper
19,5 x 14,8 cm., unique
Courtesy gallery ProjecteSD, Barcelona
