Rafa Forteza: Etymologies
Tube Gallery
Rafa Forteza
February - April 2024
I do not know if we will recur in a second
Cycle, like numbers in a periodic fraction;
But I know that a vague Pythagorean rotation
Night after night sets me down in the world. [1]
I. Beginnings and Endings
Rafa Forteza's studio (1955, Mallorca) was the first one I visited a few days after my arrival on the island. Much time has passed since that first visit in Alaró, but in subsequent visits, one has the feeling that nothing has changed. Everything has been moved around, that's for sure. The dance of pieces in progress is an intrinsic part of the work of this indefatigable creator. His practice, like life itself, is cyclical. There are places in it that he inhabits for a while: like the light comfort of a human face, only to leave and start over again... in this process, he moves skillfully from one place to another, closing successive cycles with the same ease and detachment as he does between disciplines. His entire production is a continuous shift between painting, sculpture, and drawing, but also words, which are essential in his practice and thought. They appear with poetic force on the back of his paintings and on the pages of his notebooks, where they are twisted like another material to create etymologies charged with new meanings.
His first exhibition at Tube Gallery is titled "Rafa Forteza: Etymologies" and is organized on two levels, starting with his most recent paintings. From there, it proposes a reverse journey through his sculptures and drawings, until reaching some works from the nineties that have survived in his studio over time. In this way, it suggests a return to the origin to then retrace the path taken.
II. Etymological Origins
As a discipline, etymology is the study of the origin of words, but also of their changes in form and meaning over time. In this sense, the exhibition proposes an etymological analysis of Rafa Forteza's work, paying attention to the evolution in his language over thirty years. Now, how do you trace the path to the origin of a particular artistic practice?
I met the artist in rather particular circumstances, transcribing a long conversation that a mutual friend had recorded. While transcribing, one often stops the conversation, gathers the sense of the words, pays attention to pauses, rhythms, and tone of voice, wonders about the experience behind the concepts... The same happens when observing his paintings: in them, one can appreciate the pauses, changes in rhythm, and the duration of the strokes. Sounds are replaced by colors and words by shapes. They are joyful, vibrant, curved, changing, always fluid. Perhaps the origin of a particular artistic practice is nothing more than the invention of a problem.
Upon entering the gallery, visitors are greeted by two scepters that they can hold while touring the exhibition. These portable sculptures dialogue with the rest of the works, generating new readings of them. For example, they resonate with the recent paintings occupying the first room. These are a series of paintings on linen in which the color green acts as a guiding thread, as does the face, which emerges sometimes between lines and other times between splashes of color. The large size canvas serves as a visual dictionary being continuously written. The sculpture “The Angel” (1991) hangs from the gallery ceiling and is formed through a gesture recurring in the artist's work: wrapping. Seeing objects again in a new light, in circumstantial meetings, encounters, and juxtapositions. Sometimes, not only materials, but also the sculptures themselves gather in these types of meetings, thus remaining open to future reinterpretations. The shelf is a meeting space where different sculptures are stored to coexist for a moment, through different times and materials, from the canvases wrapped in tape to the head calmly resting on a felt sphere, passing through the one finding its balance in a shoe. The presence of wood and linen guides us through the lower floor. From the fabric rolled up in sculptures that continue to be contemporary to fabric as a pictorial surface, the material undergoes successive changes in form and meaning. These new paintings are a sort of visual synthesis of his plastic language, in which color gives way to the line marked in charcoal. A line that ends up becoming word and language. And so, little by little, the verbs that underlie his practice appear: contain, wrap, store, gather, preserve, assemble, circulate... The presence of the circle is evident in the painting "Primary Introspections" (1991) and the work on paper, reaching black and thus completing the tour of the exhibition.
Upon retracing the path, it becomes clear that if there is something definitive in Rafa Forteza's work, it is the sense of circularity and the experience of the cyclical, both at a formal and conceptual level. In the former, there is an exploration that gives rise to different disciplines: the circumference is identified with the line of drawing, the circle with the spot of paint, and the sphere with the volume of his sculptures. This experience of the cyclical is what allows a sculpture produced more than twenty years ago to coexist with a recent painting. Rafa wraps different materials using fabrics, draws the outlines of a face, and finds the circle again and again while painting on canvas. In the meantime, he writes syllables here and there, breaks them down, and puts them back together. Beginnings and endings meet, and the arrow of time that runs through the creative process reveals itself as part of a cyclical journey.
III. Circles and Returns
Through this journey, the exhibition shows a profusion of lines of research, changing forms and meanings over thirty years of inexhaustible production. This exploration of form and tireless search for meaning continues, like a joyful dance that shifts things around, plays with words, and moves in cycles and repetitions. Nietzsche claimed that there was no thought without dance, and possibly, without it, there would be no artistic creation either. It is well known that the German philosopher was a classical philologist and had extensive knowledge of language and the origin of Greek words. In one of his best-known works, he proposed the idea of eternal recurrence to illustrate the great affirmation underlying his vitalist philosophy. Suppose a demon were to say to us: “This life, as you live it at present, and have lived it, you must live it once more, and also innumerable times; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh, and all the unspeakably small and great in thy life must come to you again (…)”[2] In essence, I believe Rafa already speaks with that demon, which is why he always says yes to one more day of work in the studio.
[1] Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Cyclical Night”. Spanish, trans. Alastair Reid, Selected Poems, ed. Alexander Coleman, Viking Penguin, 1999.
[2] Nietzsche, Friedrich. “The Gay Science”. Book IV. Aphorism §341.