Photo:  Wanda Acosta  (december 2010)

In search of the unnamed painting or that which I continuously attempt to name  is a work in progress initiated in December, 2010 within the collective sample Jóvenes Artistas Argentinos (Young Argentinean Artists), Galería Departamento 21, Santiago, Chile, under the curatorship of Ana Gallardo. 

The project is the variation of the same performing-action in different places and time, which takes over an open or enclosed space –of anywhere between 6 to 8 m² – spaces imagined to briefly inhabit them as a creative workshop, places in which the imaginary material (that comprises the search toward the unnamed painting) is re-generated.

The features of each location will be those insinuating how to incorporate the habitat of this creative studio, a physical and imaginary laboratory toward developing a specific work session, and which is part and parcel of the search of the unnamed painting.

 
Artists:                               Teatro de lo Ausente + Mariela Scafati   (Chile/Argentina)

Name of the Event:              - En busca del cuadro sin nombre o el suceso de lo que

                                           siempre intento titular -

N°1 entitling Attempt:          - ...Y la belleza era todo aquello que silenciosamente,  

                                           clandestino y fugitivo nos había pasado cuando   

                                           la buscábamos… -

Name of the Installation:       - Bordes de una fábula que pasó -

Presences:                            Guillermo Jorge Alfonso, among many others.

Absents:                               Mariela Scafati, among many others.

Musicals drafts:                    Ángela Acuña.

Photo/image:                       Wanda Acosta.

Duration of the Event:           14 minutes.

Preparation for the Event:     50 minutes.

Production:                           Ottava Traversa - Cultural Association (Venice)

--->  The event which I always intend to entitle...

         Mariela Scafati is a painter, social activist and performer (Argentina).
One day in the spring of 2001, she paints a small painting that hangs between her pillow and the white wall of her bedroom. For 4 years that painting inhabits hanging… almost camouflaged in its daily.

In May, 2005, she is invited for the first time to participate in an art fair, ARTEBA, in Buenos Aires where, along with other paintings of hers, she exhibits that hanging painting with different colored stripes of the same width of the frame.

There is a sudden market rush… and the little painting is sold.
While puzzled by the romanticism caused by the first purchaser of a work of hers, and while she is being photographed because of this success, she experiences a sensation that appears to escape from her… and that she is unable to unwind.
In just seconds, the young man decides to take the painting without even packaging it, quickly vanishing among the crowd.
Anxiously, the artist’s friends approach her to find out what has happened, because they have seen someone hastily walking by carrying her lost painting under his arm.

Time goes by. And on the wall near her pillow there remains a tenuous,
            almost imperceptible trace of a disappearance.

Time goes by… and her wall is once again painted white, covering the
            trace with a subtle achromatic condition.

Four years later, Mariela is invited to the 7° Biennial of Mercosur (Porto Alegre 2009), where, oddly enough, she feels driven to search for the painting that she lost, which she never even named, or perhaps which the throbs of distance had submerged…

She evokes the painting, from the pavilion. 

She enlarges it to the size of a wall, amplifying its state of distant latency.
She recreates those stripes, almost as big as corridors, where she attempts to encompass time and space.

In one month, Mariela painted 750 paper posters… conveying one of the colors of the unnamed painting to each poster.
She distributes the paper posters along each color route until creating the first version of the reconstituted painting, this time, however, almost blending it entirely into the recreated white wall…

In the second month, she adds new posters on top of it. 
Thus, day after day she stacks 10 images of the painting one over the other, constituting ten layers that absorb the same image.

Every image declaration transmits movement to the derived image, diluting the origin and transfiguring the destination.

Here, the search of the painting is placated as Mariela begins tearing off pieces of the layers that reconstitute the lost painting. 
The participants join this act, as if their presences were also a succession of confusing folds or layers.

Every time that a piece of paper is torn off, the same fractioned color is found under it.

However, only some of them reach that wall… while hand-sized white holes sprouting from the wall… dug out almost as if headed toward emptiness.

            The unnamed painting was being reconstituted from a new imaginative dimension, torn by an insistent search, fragmented by memory.

    Two years later, she insists on the need to go and look for her painting.

Inhabited by that past experience, she takes a path towards fantasizing which does not exist and resides outside of her, maybe a reader or someone staring from the outside, a third person, a stranger, an itinerary, a vanishing point lost out.

Thus she resumes this new expedition, entrusting the mission to the Theatre of the Absent, when attracted by its name and appearance.  One theatrical group produced by the actor and performer Guillermo Jorge Alfonso (Chilean), oddly resembling the features sketched for the portraits of him fleeing with the painting, based on the references given by the witnesses that saw the young man carrying the painting under his arm, and which Mariela sketched out in order to help with that initial search…

The actor will pass by the contours of the events that occurred with the painting, to enter a search attempting to pass through the layers and reach beyond that which might really exist under such an imperceptible and abstract painting… in another time.
         In turn, Guillermo trusts the cellist and musical composer, Ángela Acuña (Chilean), to thread and baste the audible pulses of this imaginative journey.

The sequence of the same event reflects on the intangible layers that constitute an unnamed painting; a painting that dissolves mimicking a daily routine.

The artists involved agree to each distinguish themselves at different distances in order to take on this new relationship with the unknown distance between an image and a presence.

The locations cause a creative process that will examine the approaches with the absent, within which the constant traffic of e-mails, letters, photographs, calls or parcel posts are reinterpretation sources and successive appropriation of a creative, every-day and intimate material that will lead them to lurk on the new imaginative dimension in which that painting resides.

At a distance the trajectory of this project is architecture of presences and absences, a connecting event that passes into another part of its own sensibility that is reconstituted from another alphabet and energy appearing in an indistinct presence.

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

Translation and copyediting:  

Reitze & Co, Eleni Papaioannou  (English)

Fabio Bozzato, Luca Core, Idoia Hormaza de Prada  (Italian)

Under the patronage of: 

Embassy of Chile in Italy

  The Italo-Latin American Institute of Rome (IILA)

Supported by: 

Reitze & Co - Corporate Translation Services (Chile)

Stefanello Neon (Venice)

Thanks to: 

Elena Piaggi, Giulia Sepe, Alexandra Oebel, Javier Silva, Massimo Premuda, Lesley Foster