AUTO-TUNE 09 I

20 Kandinsky 1963 (note 2), p. 44. 21 Dani Cavallaro, Synesthesia and the Arts, Jefferson,

Caroline du Nord et Londres, 2013, pp. 7-8. 22 Ibid., p. 5. 23 Eamon Ore-Giron lors d'une conversation avec l'auteure de ce texte, le 21 mai 2021. 24 Eamon Ore-Giron lors d'une conversation avec l'auteure de ce texte, le 21 mai 2021. 25 Vassily Kandinsky, Rückblick [1913], Baden-Baden, 1955, p. 25.

La traduction française citée ici provient de Vassily Kandinsky et Buffet-Picabia Gabrielle,

Regard sur le passé, Galerie R. Drouin, Paris, 1946, p. 24. Coatlicue, la déesse aztèque à la jupe de serpents, créatrice et destructrice de toute forme et matière, qui représente la dualité du spirituel et du physique, du féminin et du masculin, est évoquée par l'artiste au moyen d'une synthèse symétrique de son vocabulaire totémique, iconique, de formes abstraites et par une palette dominée par des bleus et des tons terreux. Le choix des couleurs d’Ore-Giron peut être interprété comme la tentative de l'artiste de réunir et de mélanger des systèmes de croyances et de connaissances différents et pourtant convergents. Lorsque les Conquistadores espagnols ont importé leurs croyances et valeurs religieuses dans le soi-disant Nouveau Monde, la figure de la Vierge Marie (la Vierge de Guadalupe) a été superposée à celle de Coatlicue, qui a été brusquement privée de ses caractéristiques plus instinctives et sexuelles. Si le bleu évoque les éléments naturels de l'eau et de l'air, dans la tradition aztèque, il était aussi associé à la divinité et dans la religion catholique, il est devenu inextricablement lié à la Vierge Marie. Le brun en revanche représente la ségrégation ou la mort (c'est la couleur de l'ordre des frères franciscains), mais est aussi étroitement associé à la terre et donc à la fertilité.

Synesthésie cosmique et Auto-Tuning Dans l'étude Über das Geistige in der Kunst, Kandinsky a rigoureusement étudié la relation qui existe entre la musique et certaines formes et couleurs spécifiques. Selon lui, ces éléments sont intimement liés et leurs relations sont réglées par des rapports exacts et pratiquement universaux: «On parle couramment du ‘parfum des couleurs’ ou de leur sonorité. Et il n’y a personne, tant cette sonorité est évidente, qui puisse trouver une ressemblance entre le jaune vif et les notes basses du piano ou entre la voix du soprano et la laque rouge foncé».20

Le phénomène neurologique décrit par Kandinsky et selon lequel l'expérience d'une sensation dans un domaine de perception stimule une sensation involontaire dans un autre domaine de perception est connu sous le nom de synesthésie (du grec ancien syn, «ensemble» et aesthesis, «sensation»). De récentes études ont démontré qu'il existe jusqu'à dix-neuf types différents de perceptions intersensorielles, dont les plus courantes sont caractérisées par une association de lettres et de chiffres (graphèmes-couleurs) ou de sons (audition colorée) avec des couleurs spécifiques.21 Cette coalescence de différents aspects du sensorium peut être un phénomène biologique et donc non délibéré (synesthésie réelle) ou une construction volontaire déterminée par l'exposition à la culture (synesthésie artistique). Comme Dani Cavallaro l'a observé dans son étude détaillée Synesthesia and the Arts, «même une œuvre d'art sans caractéristiques synesthésiques évidentes peut être vécue comme un événement synesthésique par des récepteurs disposés à la laisser stimuler non seulement le sens auquel elle s'adresse explicitement, mais aussi d'autres parties du sensorium.» 22

Ore-Giron n'est pas «réellement» synesthète et n'essaie pas non plus de fournir une clé d'interprétation pour lire ses œuvres comme Kandinsky l'a fait. Pourtant, son approche synesthésique va bien au-delà de son expérience personnelle et d'un contexte circonstanciel. Au contraire, il repousse la limite géographique et culturelle de son identité métissée pour incorporer et absorber un mariage intersensoriel de sons peints et de visions acoustiques et pour exprimer une nouvelle interprétation égalitaire et en ce sens cosmique de l'abstraction géométrique. Par la même occasion, l'observation de ses compositions abstraites aux couleurs vives entraîne indéniablement une sensation rythmique, qui éveille une réponse émotionnelle et spirituelle individuelle chez le spectateur.

Le titre de l'exposition de l'Espace Muraille, «Auto-Tune», est né lors d'une conversation avec l'artiste au sujet de sa série Infinite Regress, qui constitue le plus grand des deux ensembles d'œuvres inclus dans l'exposition. «Auto-Tune» fait référence au processeur audio utilisé par les producteurs de musique depuis la fin des années 1990 pour mesurer et corriger la tonalité des voix et des instruments de musique. Connu comme «l'effet Cher» parce qu'il a commencé à être largement utilisé par les musiciens pop après le succès de l'artiste américaine avec sa chanson Believe (1998), l'auto-tune est en fait né en tant que dispositif pour corriger la justesse de la voix, tout en y ajoutant un éclat supplémentaire et peut ainsi porter une connotation légèrement négative. En fixant des paramètres, qui ne se répètent pas exactement, mais sont néanmoins présents dans chaque œuvre de la série, les peintures d'Ore-Giron de la série Infinite Regress peuvent être interprétées comme une transposition visuelle d'un effet d'auto-tune. «Comme la musique», explique l'artiste, «elles se livrent à un remix sans fin, constamment soumises à une réinterprétation.» 23

Il ne fait aucun doute qu'Ore-Giron n'a pas besoin d'auto-tune pour faire chanter ses tableaux. Cependant, le caractère métallique et réverbérant que l'utilisation de couleurs vives et d'or ajoute à ses peintures leur confère une qualité mélismatique insaisissable et surnaturelle. L'effet musical généré par le chant d'une seule syllabe étendue tout en suivant une succession de notes différentes est visuellement traduit dans les peintures d'Ore-Giron en multipliant la succession d'une sélection réduite de formes géométriques à travers une multitude de combinaisons chromatiques. En introduisant une variation répétitive dans une réflexion sur la culture populaire passée et présente, l'artiste l'amène à un tout nouveau niveau de conscience. Le résultat est un son visuel sacré et pourtant futuriste. «Infinite Regress», selon l'artiste, «est en quelque sorte une forme d'auto-tune: elle définit des paramètres qui ne se répètent pas tout à fait mais sont présents dans chaque pièce».24

«L’Art de peindre est la rencontre tonitruante de plusieurs mondes différents», observe Kandinsky. Le résultat de ce choc est la création d'un nouveau monde «qu’on appelle l'œuvre d’Art. Chaque œuvre engendre une nouvelle technique, comme le cosmos a engendré de catastrophe en catastrophe une symphonie issue du vacarme chaotique des éléments cosmiques, qu’on appelle la musique des sphères. Créer une œuvre, c’est créer un monde».25 Mêlant les leçons de musique à sa recherche picturale, l'œuvre d'Ore-Giron est une cosmogonie synesthésique qui célèbre à la fois la richesse et la diversité de son héritage culturel panaméricain et l'héritage formel et chromatique qu'il a reçu de la lignée artistique de l'avant-garde européenne. Ses œuvres incarnent à la fois l'empreinte tragique de l'histoire et la vision pleine d'espoir et harmonieuse d'un monde nouveau.

1 This is the case, for instance, if we consider the works the artist presented on the occasion of the “Widely Unknown” exhibition, a group show curated by Eungie Joo at Deitch Projects in New York,

November 10 - December 22, 2001: https://deitch.com/archive/deitch-projects/exhibitions/widely-unknown (accessed August 31, 2021). 2 Wassily Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst: insbesondere in der Malerei, 2. ed., Munich, 1912.

There are various English translations of the original German publication.

That cited here and in the following notes is On the Spiritual in Art, first complete English translation, edited and translated by Hilla Rebay, published by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 1946, p. 47.

Available online: https://www.wassilykandinsky.net/book-concerning_the_spiritual_in_art.html (accessed August 31, 2021). 3 Ibid., p. 11. 4 Ibid., p. 57. EAMON ORE-GIRON’S PRINCIPLE OF THE INNERMOST NECESSITY: THE “AUTO-TUNE” EXHIBITION VALENTINA LOCATELLI

Since the early 2000s, when his works were still replete with references accumulated from a direct experience of the American West and its folkloristic eccentricities,1 Eamon Ore-Giron’s artistic practice has evolved from being mostly figurative and narrative to creating exquisitely intellectual yet emotionally moving abstract compositions. It is especially during the last decade that Ore-Giron has progressively abandoned any vestige of perspective in his paintings and declared his fascination for the icons of both Latin American and Western abstraction, from Joaquín Torres-García to Jorge Eielson and Carmen Herrera, from El Lissitzky to Max Bill. In fact, Ore-Giron’s canvases are now entirely dominated by flat planes and non-representational arrangements of intensely colored, geometric, and two-dimensional shapes. The artist believes that this evolution may be attributed to the fact that, over the past ten years, he has been gradually losing the vision in his right eye. While the artist’s physical condition might have contributed to this formal artistic development, there are also other more substantial underlying causes for the abstract and even transcendent character which defines his recent work. These have to be sought primarily in Ore-Giron’s affinity for and work with music and in the resulting synesthetic approach that he adopts more or less consciously in his understanding of reality and naturally embraces when painting.

The Principle of the Innermost Necessity In his groundbreaking treatise Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art, 1912) the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) articulated the reasons behind his own preference for an abstract and non-representational artistic language focused on expressing emotions and spirituality, literally marking the beginning of an entirely new chapter in art history. Formulating his artistic “principle of the innermost necessity” (in the original German text the “Prinzip der inneren Notwendigkeit”), Kandinsky observed how different “forms of harmony reflect in a corresponding vibration of the human soul”.2 He stated his belief in the absolute need of an unrestricted and non-objective painterly visualization of emotions and sensations, which he valued over any figurative and recognizable representation of the material world.

At the beginning of his book, Kandinsky observed that “every work of art is a child of its time, while often it is the parent of our emotions.” 3 While it is indisputable that every cultural period creates its art - and Kandinsky’s abstract principles were in fact shared by other contemporaries and pioneers of abstraction such as Kazimir Malevich or Piet Mondrian - Kandinsky argued that the three fundamental mystical elements upon which his “principle of the innermost necessity” resides are universal and eternal. And, as a matter of fact, they are still valid nowadays and can serve as a vade mecum to help unpack and understand Ore-Giron’s work. These factors are: first, the “element of personality”; second, the “element of style” - or the message of the epoch and the language of the nation in which the artist lives and works; and third, “the element of pure, eternal art, which is constant among all people, nations and ages” and “irrespective of time and space.” 4

Departing from each one of these elements - the artist’s biography, his style and his underlying intrinsic and spiritual idea of art as such - and reflecting on their role, reciprocal relation and resulting impact, it becomes easier to interpret Ore-Giron’s artistic path as that of a heuristic journey and spiritual discovery motivated by personal history as much as by a broader discourse of socio-political resistance, in which the language of music and a harmony of visual and abstract codes is used to evoke a sense of shared belonging and generates deep emotional responses and “vibrations” within the viewer’s soul.

From Musical Impressions and Artistic Improvisations… Born in 1973 in Tucson, Arizona, to a Peruvian father, who emigrated to the United States, and an Irish-American mother, Eamon Ore-Giron was raised and educated in an environment where diverse cultures intersect and mix, a decisive experience which has informed his artistic aesthetics and interests. Spending an important part of his formative years in Mexico and Peru - especially in Huancayo, where he worked with Josué Sánchez Cerron (b. 1945), an artist best known for his murals and his flat colored paintings depicting scenes of everyday life and popular Andean traditions - Ore-Giron has gradually developed a practice firmly rooted in the idea of cultural cross-fertilization and characterized by interdisciplinarity and a multiplicity of genres.

Besides being a painter, Ore-Giron has also worked as a sculptor, video artist, musician, and DJ - he is also known under the pseudonym of “DJ Lengua”, which means “tongue” in Spanish. When reflecting on his most recent body of work, it is not surprising to discover that a seminal part of his career was the result of an exposure to a predominantly musical, rather than merely visual, environment.

In 2001, together with Julio César Morales, Luis Illades, Joseph Franko and Juan Luna Avin, Ore-Giron founded Club Unicornio, a collaborative project between visual artists and musicians based in San Francisco consisting of a monthly dance party with DJ sets playing folk music and Latin American sounds, including South American cumbia, boogaloo and mambo, fused with cutting-edge contemporary electronic music. Then, in the mid-2000s, when he was in Los Angeles studying for his Master of Fine Arts at the University of California, Ore-Giron also began working with the OJO collective, a seven-person artistic performance and music group which drew inspiration from different musical sources. It was at this time that, as the artist recollects, he also “began to experiment with different ways of working, such as collage and incorporating text” and “moved further away from the figurative work and more into a free association of text and shapes.” 5 In 2009, for the “Into a Long Punk” exhibition at Steve Turner Contemporary Los Angeles, Ore-Giron proposed a reinterpretation of his old discarded vinyl records and incorporated them into his work including “text pieces that referenced Gaelic, Mayan, and Aztec [creation] myths. Oral tradition presented visually, with nods to Modernism and graphic design”, as he explains.6 Finally, once again with César Morales - although this time as Los Jaichakers (Spanglish for “hijacker”) 7 - Ore-Giron has continued “hijacking” and appropriating traditional music genres from Latin America and the US, especially the Mexican diaspora, absorbing and subverting them with the objective of freeing information on the black market economy and producing something completely new and audacious that resonates with the collective consciousness of both North and South America.

As Kandinsky pointed out, any painter striving to let his inner world freely express itself can only but envy the ease and levity with which music, the most “non-material” of the arts, is able to achieve such a goal. “One art”, he observed, “must learn from another how to use its common principle and how to apply it to the fundamentals of its own medium. Borrowing those methods, the artist must not forget that all mediums contain within themselves unique characteristics, and it is up to him to discover the proper application.” 8 More than just “borrowing” his methodology from music, Ore-Giron has let music inspire and guide him: he has used it as a starting point to create a rich and diverse body of work which is the result of an ongoing research process centered on the language of abstraction and its synthetic, rhythmic and overall “symphonic” potential.

It is well known that, by deriving new creative categories from the language of music and naming his artworks “Impressions”, “Improvisations”, and “Compositions”, Kandinsky theorized a system of abstract correspondences between sounds, shapes and colors, capable of activating in the viewer those emotional and vibrational responses for which he was looking. If impressions are the direct result of any exposure to life - to the “outward nature”, as for example in the case of the impressions stimulated by a music concert - and in this sense constitute the foundation of any human sensorial experience and artistic interaction, it is the concept of improvisation – the “intuitive, for the greater part spontaneous expression of incidents of an inner character, or impressions of the ‘inner nature’” 9 - which is an especially essential component of Ore-Giron’s work. As he points out: “[...] in my global painterly practice, it's really all about improvisation and the relationship between the different elements. Without limitations, you always give yourself a lot more freedom. I think experimentation always makes everything much more interesting.” 10 Yet Ore-Giron’s paintings are also the result of “slowly evolved feelings” - to refer once more to Kandinsky’s own words. They are the outcome of a scientific approach fed by an experimental and even pedantic methodology practiced over a long period of time, repeatedly and with careful attention to details.

5 Eamon Ore-Giron, interviewed by Tiffany Barber, June 15, 2011.

Transcript of the interview published on Latin.Art.com - an online journal of art and culture, http://www.latinart.com/transcript.cfm?id=110 (accessed August 31, 2021). 6 Ibid. 7 In 2013, as Los Jaichackers, Ore-Giron and Morales presented the performance-based project “Night Shade/Solanaceae” on the occasion of the opening event of the Pérez Art Museum in Miami. 8 Kandinsky 1946 (note 2), p. 35. 9 Ibid., p. 98. 10 Eamon Ore-Giron in conversation with Jalis 2019,

“Eamon Ore-Giron: Notre Renaissance sera une exaltation collective”,

July 18, 2020, Soleil Rouge Magazine, https://soleilrougemagazine.com/selon-ore-giron-notre-renaissance-sera-une-exaltation-collective (accessed, August 31, 2021). Original text in French,

English translation by the author of this text.

Fig.3 HEAD, 2012 Flashe on linen / Flashe sur lin, 30.5x30.5cm Private collection, courtesy of the artist Collection privée, avec l'aimable autorisation de l'artiste

Fig.4 E-D-G-B-D-G (Open Tuning), 2012 Hydrocal, cocaine, steel, twine, copper pipe, wood, flashe Hydrocal, cocaïne, acier, ficelle, tuyau en cuivre, bois, flashe, 188x68.6x30.5cm Collection of the artist / Collection de l'artiste, Los Angeles

11 On the history of the Ayacuchana guitar, see Eamon Ore-Giron’s contribution as DJ Lengua “La Guitarra Ayacuchana” on Joseph Franko’s well-respected blog, Super Sonido.

The Latin American Cultural Reverb, published on January 27, 2011, https://supersonido.net/2011/01/27/la-guitarra-ayacuchana/ (accessed August 31, 2021). 12 In the two-channel video installation Morococha (2014),

Ore-Giron reflects on China’s purchase of the eponymous Andean mining town and the relocation of its population to a new town created nine kilometers away in order to enable the extraction of copper from the soil beneath the original village. 13 Nathaniel Lee, review of the “Eamon Ore-Giron: Smuggling the Sun” exhibition at the Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, Artforum, https://www.artforum.com/picks/eamon-ore-giron-41712 (accessed August 31, 2021). 14 Eamon Ore-Giron in the video-interview featured by James Cohan on the occasion of “The Symmetry of Tears” exhibition, New York, 2021, https://www.jamescohan.com/ (accessed August 31, 2021). 15 Works from this series have been exhibited by the artist at different venues in the USA, most recently on the occasion of the Whitney Biennial in New York (2017), the group exhibition “Soft Power” at the SFMOMA in San Francisco (2019) and the solo show “The Symmetry of Tears” at the James Cohan gallery in New York (2021). … to Constructivist Symphonic Compositions Ore-Giron’s artistic practice grows out of an investigation of both Western and Latin American canons, whereby the historic and visual legacies of the Global South meet and converge with North American and European modernist traditions. As a result, his work proposes alternative and unexpected discourses expanding the potential of synchronicity and interconnectedness, unlocking them across time and space. From the largest to the smallest, the paintings which Ore-Giron has produced during the last decade are all realized on raw linen canvases using Flashe paint, a brand of richly pigmented and ultra-matte vinyl-based paint. They are characterized by appealing choreographies of circular and sharp edged-motifs in which different layers of bright, pastel or earthen colors and gold interlock and overlap, alternating solids and voids, fore- and background. Evoking motifs derived from pre-Columbian architecture, Andean textiles and ancient Peruvian gold work as much as from the abstract compositions of European avant-garde movements, Russian Constructivism and Brazilian Neo-Concretism, Ore-Giron’s paintings are the artist’s synthetic and personal response to the encounter between all these transnational narratives and legacies.

As observed previously, Ore-Giron’s work has not always been non-representational. Nonetheless, even if the paintings he presented in 2005 on the occasion of “Mirage” - his first museum exhibition, held at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art in Philadelphia - were based on photographs and depicted the cultural references and idiosyncrasies he had absorbed and been confronted with both in Peru and the USA, the visual language he adopted was already abstract in its essence. In paintings such as Praise for the Morning (fig.1) or Exit Strategy (fig.2), depth and space are flattened, distance and perspective are rendered only by the juxtaposition of stripes and flat planes of different homogeneous earthy tones. However, in order to overcome the boundaries imposed by figuration and be able to elevate and crystallize his artistic message into the iconic levity of the geometric compositions which have by now become the artist’s signature, Ore-Giron had first to completely immerse himself in music before he could re-emerge from it, synthetize that emotional experience and be able to derive a new visual vocabulary from his personal response to it.

It was only in 2012 that the influence of popular art, graphic design and muralism contained in essence in the works presented in Philadelphia would finally converge with the knowledge derived from all the musical experiences and profound acoustic impressions outlined above. For the “Open Tuning, E-D-G-B-D-G” exhibition, presented in Santa Monica at the 18th Street Arts Center, the artist proposed a choreography of multifarious artworks, from sculpture and painting to video, from music to live performances. Named after the tuning scale of the “guitarra Ayacuchana”,11 the exceptionally melancholic string instrument typical of the Andean region of Ayacucho, the project drew inspiration both from autobiographical episodes and memories - Ore-Giron’s father was from Ayacucho - and from a reflection over the centuries-long history of colonization and exploitation of Latin America and the resulting miscegenation and fusion of indigenous and Western cultural and aesthetic codes which, from the Spanish conquest onwards, have characterized the local artistic production, both musical and visual. Next to a political video piece condemning the grimmest effects of globalization on the Peruvian social frame 12 and a selection of mostly figurative works based on photographs, the exhibition included some of the artist’s first abstract paintings on raw linen canvases. Among these Head (fig.3), an abstract portrait of the Ayacucho guitar, was also a clin d’œil to the celebrated cubist guitar paintings of European masters such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.

The same trajectory initiated in Santa Monica was continued and further perfected with “Smuggling the Sun”, the artist’s first solo show in New York, held in 2013 at the Nicelle Beauchene Gallery. With the exception of one abstract sculptural piece - a deconstruction of the Ayacucho guitar composed of a set of six colored copper chimes hanging from a linear metal structure (fig.4) - this time the exhibition was devoted to painting. In ten small format canvases, Ore-Giron paid tribute to the modern masters who, as art critic Nathaniel Lee points out, “were instrumental in the early formation of nonrepresentational, geometric art”, for instance referencing the brilliant orphic color palette and concentric compositions of Sonia and Robert Delaunay as well as the “oblique perspective seen in the mechanical drawings of a certain vintage, namely - if faintly - the sleek, seemingly rational designs of Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia.” 13 In this sense, “Smuggling the Sun” represents a pivotal moment in the artist’s career, as it marks Ore-Giron’s non-reversible transition from figuration to constructivist and geometric abstraction. It was only after fully embracing a non-representational artistic vocabulary that the artist was finally enabled to express his “innermost necessity” and articulate his emotions and spirituality in the manner he had so far only been able to do with music.

Infinite Regress While acknowledging that Ore-Giron’s paintings exhibited at the Nicelle Beauchene Gallery were “smart, exceptionally likable and deceptively modest”, The New York Times art critic Ken Johnson concluded his review of the show wondering what would they be like if the artist “put his all into them?”. This rather provocative question was boldly answered by Ore-Giron shortly thereafter with his new and still ongoing body of work.

In 2015, within less than a month, the artist experienced the death of his beloved mother and the birth of his first child, Octavio. These intense emotional events brought him to a mental space where, as he explains, he was simultaneously “experiencing the potential future” but also a “loss, which was like through the past.” 14 It was from the perturbing mirroring and overlapping of the idea of definitive end with that of a brand-new beginning that the artist began work on his so called Infinite Regress series, creating rigorously constructivist and yet splendidly symphonic compositions which, in their essence, are the most striking result and the culmination of the integration process between music, colors and abstract forms he has been pursuing all through his career.15

The concept of “infinite regress” (from the latin regressus in infinitum) is a philosophical one and is determined by skepticism, by the will to prove the inadequacy of a demonstration and hence put knowledge in question. It designates the logical progression, or rather regression, that occurs when, in order to explain a given term, it is necessary to refer to another one and so forth, without ever being able to reach the final and ultimate definition or truth. Each painting in Ore-Giron’s series is like a ring in an endless chain of meaning: while it requires and is contained in its embryonic form in the works that precede it, it also introduces variations to them and is therefore indispensable for giving birth to and understanding the essence of the works that follow it in the sequence. In this sense, the series is a “mise en abyme” with countless variations and a metaphor for the continuity between life and death.

Ore-Giron’s Infinite Regress series would apparently be condemned to an endless process of elaboration by addition or reduction towards a limitless and unreachable destination. This impossible situation can however be solved and acquire meaning if the series is placed in relation to the rest of the artist’s work: that which preceded it, as this text has attempted to do so far, and that which will eventually unfold from it. At the same time, Infinite Regress should also be appreciated in light of what has been said about the “principle of the innermost necessity”: in the broader context of art history, it is Ore-Giron’s personal interpretation of and response to non-representational art, his contribution - modulated by the “element of personality” and the “element of style” - to the ever-evolving grammar of “pure, eternal art”. It is also Ore-Giron’s attempt at elaborating on the different histories of abstraction with which he has been confronted, both Andean and Western and Eurocentric, commingling their lessons in order to underscore their common origin in the intrinsically human need for a sense of spiritual belonging.

The Infinite Regress paintings are all structured following a regular spatial composition. They have an upper section, roughly corresponding to the upper third of the canvas, setting the line of the horizon upon which the astral-like and polychromatic abstract geometric arrangement unfolds, and a lower section, dominated by the color gold, and to which the artist refers to as “the terrestrial part of the painting.” 16 The latter creates a sort of luminous architectonic screen reminiscent of the perforated walls typically found in much of the vernacular architecture in Latin America. It is through this filter which the viewer standing in front of the painting can glimpse the cosmogenesis happening in the background of the composition and above the horizon line, in the celestial realm. At the same time, the dominant gold palette is also evocative of “the bell-shaped skirts of the Virgins in paintings of the Peruvian Cuzco school” 17 as well as of the use of gold leaf and gold ground in Byzantine and early Renaissance art with Christian iconography.

Furthermore, there is a specific cultural dynamic, an attempt at making amends for history implicit in Ore-Giron’s use of gold paint in his canvases. As he points out: “I’ve been exploring the occurrence when the Conquest happened and so much gold was taken from the native people, the double theft that occurred, on the one side the physical theft of the gold, and on the other side the cultural theft of all the artifacts that were melted down to obtain more gold. All those masterpieces which were turned into liquid gold and were lost forever.” 18 In this sense, Infinite Regress expresses the artist’s contribution to a process of decolonization, his desire to restitute the stolen gold and recreate contemporary masterpieces capable of reconnecting to that lost lineage.

The Exhibition at Espace Muraille The “Auto-Tune” exhibition at Espace Muraille is Eamon Ore-Giron’s first solo show in continental Europe. Distributed on the two levels of the gallery space, the artworks in the exhibition radiate light and emanate transcendent levity. Their luminosity transforms the space and sparks a conversation with Espace Muraille’s historic architecture. Under the crypt-like vaulted ceilings of what used to be an 18th century cellar, the public encounter an immersive presentation of Ore-Giron’s work, which generates a meditative and almost mystical experience and causes a sense of spatial displacement.

The show features eighteen new paintings of different scales from the artist’s ongoing Infinite Regress series (from number CLX to CLXXVII; cat.1 to 18) as well as two loom-woven tapestries created in collaboration with the Taller Mexicano de Gobelinos in Guadalajara, Mexico, which directly reference the Aztec creation myths and hence add a further spiritual facet to the artist’s cosmic vision.

The tapestry Talking Shit with Quetzalcoatl / I Like Mexico and Mexico Likes Me (cat.19) was exhibited for the first time in a group show organized by the American performance artist Rafa Esparza (b.1981) at Ballroom Marfa in Texas. On that occasion it was placed on a “two-layer mound of adobe bricks created by Esparza - part plinth part altar - that served as both a physical and a metaphorical support for the large textile. Presented in this way, Ore-Giron’s work was transformed into a ritual object or offering to Quetzalcoatl”, one of the most important gods in the Aztec pantheon, “here abstracted into a swirling snake composed of greens, blues, and reds.” 19 Designed as a poncho - a traditional garment used by Native American peoples since before the Spanish conquest - and presented at Espace Muraille on a wooden structure suggesting a human presence, the textile artwork was originally meant to be worn by Esparza as an attribute of spiritual connection enabling the two artists to enter into a critical conversation.

Talking Shit with Coatlicue (cat.20), on the other hand, has been deliberately conceived and produced for the exhibition at Espace Muraille. Hanging like a wall tapestry on the staircase connecting the exhibition space on the ground floor with the one in the basement, it functions according to the artist as “the protector of the exhibition”, hence underscoring a sense of ceremonial descent into the sacral dimension of the crypt where Ore-Giron’s largest paintings in the exhibition are presented.

16 Eamon Ore-Giron 2021 (note 14). 17 Marcela Guerrero, “Eamon Ore-Giron”, in: Soft Power.

A Conversation for the Future, exh. cat., ed. by Eugenie Joo,

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2019, pp. 156–161, here p. 156. 18 Eamon Ore-Giron during a conversation with the author of this text, May 21, 2021. 19 MacKenzie Stevens, “Eamon Ore-Giron”, in Anne Ellegood and Erin Christovale,

Made in L.A. 2018, exh. catalogue, Hammer Museum, University of California,

Los Angeles, Munich, London and New York, 2018, pp. 169-170.

20 Kandinsky 1963 (note 2), p. 44. 21 Dani Cavallaro, Synesthesia and the Arts, Jefferson,

North Carolina and London, 2013, pp. 7-8. 22 Ibid., p. 5. 23 Eamon Ore-Giron during a conversation with the author of this text, May 21, 2021. 24 Eamon Ore-Giron during a conversation with the author of this text, May 21, 2021. 25 Vassily Kandinsky, Rückblick [1913], Baden-Baden, 1955, p. 25.

Translated by the author of this text. German original text:

“Das Malen ist ein donnernder Zusammenstoß verschiedener Welten, die in und aus dem Kampfe miteinander die neue Welt zu schaffen bestimmt sind, die das Werk heißt.

Jedes Werk entsteht technisch so, wie der Kosmos entstand - durch Katastrophen, die aus dem chaotischen Gebrüll der Instrumente zum Schluss eine Symphonie bilden, die Sphärenmusik heißt. Werkschöpfung ist Weltschöpfung.” Coatlicue, the Aztec snake-skirted goddess, creator and destroyer of all matter and form, who stands for the duality of bodily and spiritual, feminine and masculine elements, is evoked by the artist by means of a symmetric synthesis of his iconic totemic vocabulary of abstract shapes and by a palette dominated by blues and earthy tones. Ore-Giron choice of colors can be interpreted as the artist’s attempt at reuniting and blending different and yet convergent systems of beliefs and knowledge. When the Spanish conquistadores imported their set of religious beliefs and values to the so-called New World, the figure of the Virgin Mary (the Virgin of Guadalupe) was overlapped with that of Coatlicue, who was abruptly deprived of her more instinctual and sexual elements. If blue is evocative of the natural elements of water and air, in the Aztec tradition it was also associated with deity, and in the Catholic religion it became inextricably related to the Virgin Mary. Brown, on the other hand, represents segregation or death (it is the color of the order of the Franciscan friars) but is also strongly associated with the earth and hence with fertility.

Cosmic Synesthesia and Auto-Tuning In the study Über das Geistige in der Kunst, Kandinsky rigorously investigated the correspondence between music and specific shapes and colors. He believed that these elements were intimately connected and their relationships regulated by exact and nearly universal correspondences: “the sound of colour is so precise”, he wrote, “that it would be difficult to locate anyone who would attempt to express the impression of bright yellow in the bass notes of the piano, or rose-madder as a soprano voice.” 20

The neurological phenomenon described by Kandinsky and according to which the experience of a sensation in one domain of perception stimulates an inadvertent sensation in another domain of perception is known as synesthesia (from the ancient Greek root syn, “together” and aesthesis, “sensation”). Contemporary research has demonstrated that there are as many as nineteen different types of cross-sensory perceptions, the most common of which are characterized by an association of letters and numbers (grapheme-color) or sound (colored-hearing) with specific colors.21 This coalescence of different aspects of the sensorium can be a biological and hence undeliberate phenomenon (actual synesthesia) or a voluntary construction determined by cultural exposure (artistic synesthesia). As Dani Cavallaro has observed in her comprehensive study Synesthesia and the Arts, “even an artwork with no obvious synesthetic features may be experienced as a synesthetic event by receivers willing to let it stimulate not only the sense to which it explicitly appeals but also other parts of the sensorium.” 22

Ore-Giron was not born an “actual” synesthete nor does he attempt to provide an interpretation key to read his works as did Kandinsky. Yet, his synesthetic approach goes well beyond a personal and circumstantial background. Rather, it pushes the geographical and cultural limit of his mixed identity to incorporate and absorb a cross-sensory blend of painted sounds and acoustic visions and give expression to a new, egalitarian and in this sense cosmic interpretation of geometric abstraction. At the same time, observing his brightly colored abstract compositions does undeniably result in a rhythmic sensation, which awakens an individual emotional and spiritual response in the viewer.

The title of the Espace Muraille exhibition, “Auto-Tune”, emerged during a conversation with the artist about his Infinite Regress series, which makes up the largest of the two body of works included in the show. “Auto-Tune” refers to an audio processor that has been used by music producers since the late 1990s for the purpose of measuring and improving pitch in both vocal and instrumental music. Known as the “Cher effect” because it became widely used by pop musicians after the success of the American recording artist’s song Believe (1998), auto-tune was actually born as a device to correct a singer’s off-pitch voice, adding extra shine to it, and can hence carry a slightly negative connotation. By setting parameters that do not exactly repeat but are nevertheless present in every work in the series, Ore-Giron’s Infinite Regress paintings can therefore be interpreted as a visual transposition of an auto-tuning effect. “Like music”, as the artist explains, “they are engaged in an endless remix, constantly subject to reinterpretation.” 23

There is no question that Ore-Giron does not need auto-tune to make his paintings sing in tune. However, the metallic and reverberating character that the use of vibrant colors and gold adds to his paintings provides them with an elusive and otherworldly melismatic quality. The musical effect generated by the singing of a single, extended syllable of text while moving between a succession of different notes is visually translated in Ore-Giron’s paintings by multiplying the succession of a reduced selection of geometric shapes through a variety of chromatic combinations. Introducing a repetitive variation into a reflection on past and present popular culture, the artist brings it to an entirely new level of consciousness. The result is a sacral yet futuristic visual sound. “Infinite Regress”, according to the artist, “is in a way a form of auto-tuning, it sets parameters that don’t quite repeat but are present in every piece.” 24

“Painting is a thunderous collision of different worlds”, Kandinsky observed. The outcome of this clash is the creation of a new world “which is called an artwork. Technically, each artwork is created in the same way as the cosmos was created - through catastrophes, which, out of the chaotic dissonance of instruments, at the end produce a symphony, which is called the music of the spheres. The creation of an artwork is the creation of a world.” 25 Blending the lessons of music into his painterly research, Ore-Giron’s work is a synesthetic cosmogony that celebrates both the richness and diversity of his Pan-American cultural heritage and the formal and chromatic legacy he has inherited from the artistic lineage of the European avant-garde. His works enact at the same time the tragic footprint of history and the hopeful and harmonic vision of a new world.

Cat.05 INFINITE REGRESS CLXIV, 2021 Cat.08 INFINITE REGRESS CLXVII, 2021 Cat.07 INFINITE REGRESS CLXVI, 2021 Cat.06 INFINITE REGRESS CLXV, 2021 40 I 41

Cat.10 INFINITE REGRESS CLXIX, 2021 Cat.20 TALKING SHIT WITH COATLICUE, 2020 Cat.11 INFINITE REGRESS CLXX, 2021 44 I 45

Cat.09 INFINITE REGRESS CLXVIII, 2021 Cat.19 TALKING SHIT WITH QUETZALCOATL / I LIKE MEXICO AND MEXICO LIKES ME, 2017

Cat.13 INFINITE REGRESS CLXXII, 2021 Cat.16 INFINITE REGRESS CLXXV, 2021 Cat.14 INFINITE REGRESS CLXXIII, 2021