EDGAR PLANS: ART NOTES
VILLAZAN is pleased to announce Art Notes by Edgar Plans in Madrid.
November 12, 2021 – January 8, 2022
Among the objects that the artist uses in his liturgy towards the final work, the notebook is perhaps the most fetishized. Especially from the mid-nineteenth century, when the dilettante communities of the time (almost all of them being snobs with high levels of sensitivity) went through the romantic outburst to possess the soul of the creators.
Let us think with the Heidegger mind set, that finished work as it’s understood, means establishing a world that puts into operation all the truths of the thing itself. In other words, the work ceases to be an object of the world to become the world itself. So, this mumbo jumbo of bastard ideas executed quickly by the artist's hands on a pile of stitched sheets of paper, what will they be? what reason for being will define them? Notes, notes, sketches, flying lines, orphan words, disordered thoughts, blots and stains will suppose the world not yet formed; the unfinished, the origin and the process; the test, the experimentation, the improvisation, the trial, the error and the success.
In addition, they come seasoned with a pinch of, I don't know, what secret never revealed that makes this world an enigmatic and disturbing place. Hence the fetish, the drive, the paranoia, the object of desire.
The magical creative impulse contained in these notebooks are a kind of attempt to catch and fix the goblin. Illusive artists! The goblin, the muse, the lighting…or whatever it is who visits you out of the blue, slaps you twice and leaves without hesitation. The notes are what remains of those flashes of endowed reality that no philosopher can explain. In many cases they are traces charged with an intense obsession to order and classify a world of its own, ungovernable and extremely inaccessible, which is born from a blow of inspiration with no apparent foundation.
Artist notebooks are the containers that house all those expressions of the immaterial that arise from perceived reality. They are the essence of this reality and the substance of being an artist in its fullness. They are also the continents of the lysergic unveiling of the world, of the revelation of the whole, of the origin of the creation of new universes. In short, these papers serve to express paths through the soul, The Soul...which is by all accounts, a wonderful mystery.
I use photography, captured through my microscope where I collect my own specimens – some from the natural world, some from my own body, and donated specimens. These photographs are layered or embedded with renders to create the final reference image. I translate these images onto canvas with oil, and mixtures of oil and sediment, marble dust, sand, and other oil mediums. These different viscosities of the paint allow me to use the natural movement of fluids to pool into watercolour-like soft moments or thick impasto formations . Other times, I will use surgical tool to carve out thick paint and reveal the underlying layers like unearthing the body of the canvas.”