THE VICISSITUDES OF THE AUTOMATON

1 The Vicissitudes of the Automaton

Did the mechanical conception of the world project an image or an automatic figuration of the human conscience on itself? Does the universe, wonderfully mechanized by the thought of man, turn its automatic testimony against him? Is man imprisoned inside that prodigious machine that verifies him mechanically by completely absorbing him?

José Bergamín1

The exhibition project dedicated to the work of Néstor Sanmiguel Diest (b. 1949, Zaragoza), of which this publication forms part, covers his production from the end of the 1980s to the present. Rather than being organized in the habitual manner of the retrospective,2 it shows series of works produced at di erent moments of his career and traces paths that draw us into a practice that the artist himself refers to as “painterly occupations.”

Since the first years of his activity, connected with the founding of artistic groups like A Ua Crag, Red District, and Segundo partido de la montaña,3

Sanmiguel Diest has shown himself to be a methodical and prolific artist who uninterruptedly devises and combines systems, rules, and protocols for application in the construction of his pieces. His vast oeuvre, mainly drawings and paintings, forms a singular catalogue that blurs the boundaries between image and text, like a palimpsest that simultaneously hides and reveals a succession of interrelated narratives that obstinately prod the viewer.

On various occasions, Sanmiguel Diest has referred to his practice as the “craft of dodging,”4 a premise that takes shape in his manner of situating himself on a periphery that is not only geographical but also discursive and material. This flight or self-distancing from the most widespread narratives and debates has functioned as a tactic or method, generating a thought and a corpus of work that questions and challenges contemporary modes of production, their spaces of representation, and their organization of time. Remote from any convention and shunning the urgency of the new, his work contains frequent references to the fields of art history, literature, and music, but also to the most ordinary and everyday things, something that materializes in his pieces with the incorporation of bills, fragments of texts, letters, notes, medical prescriptions, delivery notes, press cuttings, and an inexhaustible repertoire of documents belonging to his daily activity. It is an invitation to wander through a “jungle of symbols,” a space plagued with expressive silences, in a constant negotiation with what piles up on the margins and often goes unnoticed. This oeuvre does not share in a literal interpretation of the world, but rests instead on a simultaneity of appropriations, discoveries, and citations, like a potentially infinite and circular mechanism of astonishing density and rhythm.

The Vicissitudes of the Automaton begins with a series of large-format paintings produced in the 1980s and early 1990s, a period when the artist had two occupations. On the one hand, he was working in his studio in Aranda de Duero, and, on the other, he was employed as a pattern designer at a textile factory, a job he did not fully give up until 2000, when he decided to devote himself exclusively to painting. From his professional career in the textile industry, he derived the application of a meticulous and precise logic to his working methods, as well as constant allusions to a militant (but not documentary) iconography that ironically references the world of labor relations and its revolutionary imaginaries. At the same time, games with initials and acronyms, together with allusions to political parties and trade unions (both o cial and fictitious), served to broaden the workers’ iconography so beloved of the artist. On many occasions, it might seem that Sanmiguel Diest transfers the eight-hour working day to the execution of a systematized production in his studio, where he also has an assembly line made to his own measure. In his domain, it is common to come across instruments used in fashion, couture, and textile manufacture such as rulers, guides, molds, and designs. Following this logic, which connects political activity, artistic practice, and action, it is easy to trace references in his images of this period to his job as a pattern designer and the production processes it involves, such as prototyping, cutting, and calculating.

The transfers between studio and factory are manifest in works like Goethe dice (Goethe Says, 1991), a series of canvases where he embroiders di erent phrases attributed to the German author on geometric figures that appear to shift and mutate on the canvas, or in Wie Gefällst Du Dir Besser (1991), a group of images employing photographs of the interior of a car factory, upon which the artist superimposes a geometric form that he associates with “black mirrors.” This is the moment when he establishes di erent practices that mark his later activity: the serialized repetition of the image, the accumulation of archive material, and the increasingly evident incorporation of text into his works. Pieces like Juan Carlos I, Spanish King (1989), Red Party of Twilight (1989), Country and Flag (1989), and Christian Mountains (1989) are formulated on the basis of copying almost identical images (though they always include imperceptible variations) from which he constructs the background of his canvases. To give an example of this procedure, Juan Carlos I, Spanish King reproduces the face of the former king of Spain through the frottage of a 25-peseta coin on ten-by-ten-centimeter notes numbered from 1 to 600. These papers are gummed onto the canvas to generate a network that functions as a support for a new image-drawing. The same occurs in other paintings of this series, though the motifs used are di erent. The flag of the Red Party of Twilight, with an eight-pointed star on it, is reiterated in Red Party of Twilight, or he repeats a schematic figure, almost a hieroglyphic that the artist associates with Mount Calvary, in the work entitled Christian Mountains.

Sanmiguel’s interest in these compositional systems and the processes whereby he tests these models of repetition and order becomes similarly evident in other works of the same period, like La pintura. Atardecer en casa (Painting: Evening at Home, 1989), whose background is constructed from the cut-out fragments of a previously executed drawing, and upon which a large double circle is inscribed.

Arriba: Bryant Park. Los fondos/Burton evoca a Ed Wood/Triángulo de amor bizarro/Bryant Park. Conspiración naranja/Tijuana Beach. Plancha ama de patronaje/Española del oxígeno/El Gobierno retira su proyecto/La subasta/En un bosque cercano a Ekaterinburgo/Bryant Park. Una colcha con galones/Historias secretas. Soy tan indecente como Doro/Los elegidos/El necio amenaza con apartarnos/Señales de alarma/Los restos de Ekaterinburgo/Más español que nunca/Segundo Panamá/Lanzado desde Tanegashima, 1999

Abajo: Bryant Park. Los fondos/Señales de alarma/Segundo Panamá, 1999

This motif accompanies the artist throughout his career, as it is integrated with his signature as an anagram with which he puts his mark on his works.5 In every case, these groups of works respond to a compositional logic based on the resource of mechanical repetition and automatism of gesture, aspects which once more connect them with industrial textile production. This system of images reflects the simultaneity of occupations that mutually fed each other in those years, and explores the automatisms inscribed in human nature.

2 The Birth of Agriculture 01/23/97

Times of withdrawal. Cutting the grass and undergrowth at the entrance to a mill on a stormy day. With the first cut grass, a five-liter glass jar is filled together with water, alcohol, oil, and salt. The rest of the cut grass is placed in an open wooden package of 110 × 60 × 70 cm. The jar is kept and labeled: Amarillo G.T./Julio 1992 NS. The package is left in a garbage dump without being marked or photographed. Edition of 500 numbered and sealed records.6

In 1992, Sanmiguel Diest performed an action entitled Amarillo G.T., 7 an intervention that, in his own words, signaled a definitive rupture with a previous phase, displacing his practice from the space of action to the field of the pictorial. Only a year earlier, in 1991, he put an end to his connection with the A Ua Crag group and began a solo career that led him to a search for expressive territories unknown until then in his production. The only documentation preserved of that action is a photographic record showing the exterior of a warehouse by a river immediately before and after the event. The image corresponds to the place where the artist had his studio in those years, which had a stream nearby.

It was in those “times of withdrawal” that the artist started down an unforeseen path that involved voluntary reclusion in his studio. Rather like the protagonist of Franz Kafka’s story “Der

1923), who devises a complex system of protective tunnels that end up turning into traps (and not only for the enemy), Sanmiguel Diest initiated a cycle of investigations and trials that prefigure many of the themes and concerns that recur in his later activity. He diligently recorded this phase of “sentimental restoration,” to use his own words once more, in the titles of his pieces: Nuestra madriguera secreta (Our Secret Burrow, 1993), Una buena máquina para la guerra de guerrillas (A Good Machine for Guerrilla Warfare, 1993), Barricada en la sección de enlaces (Barricade in the Links Section, 1993), Semilla sospechando hielo repentino (Seed Suspecting Sudden Frost, 1993), Situación arriesgada (Risky Situation, 1993), Muralla perforada (Breached Wall, 1993), Zona protegida (Protected Area, 1993), Nace un bicho (A Creature is Born, 1993), En la penumbra de tu corazón (In the Darkness of Your Heart, 1994), Restauración sentimental (Sentimental Restoration, 1994), No nos rendimos (We Shall Not Surrender, 1993), or Máquina de guerra (War Machine, 1994).

After the cutting of the undergrowth and his retreat from it, new spaces for enunciation and avenues of formal exploration were opened up, foremost among them his research on what are called “mother-forms,” geometric figures which refer to cellular structures in units that grow and shrink rather like sizes in manufactured clothing. This is a progression that slightly modifies the initial figure (the pattern), tracing lines that augment and diminish its dimensions. For five intense years, Sanmiguel Diest was immersed in this work on the rectification and growth of mother-forms, with which he constructed a sort of elastic alphabet that is never exhausted, and from which he was to re-establish his artistic practice: “The forms kept there begin to generate stories, tireless, desperate. So I turn each surface into a territory of fortuitous and, all through 1997, urgent encounters.” It is an inexhaustible series that overflows in every direction and occasionally manifests itself as a meticulous record of the time elapsed (and marked in the titles), a calendar that begins in 1993 and concludes in 1998: 23.01.93; 23.02.93; 10.04.93; 07.05.93; 26.06.93; 04.07.93; 29.08.93; 04.10.93; 22.10.93; 12.11.93; 01.12.93; 26.02.94; 04.03.94; 14.06.94; 30.08.94; 27.01.95; 24.06.95; 10.10.95; 10.05.96; 03.07.96; 25.09.96; 05.10.96; 20.01.97…

Coinciding with the end of these works, the year 1997 marked a new watershed with the beginning of Las emociones barrocas (The Baroque Emotions, 1997–2005). In this case, the work functions as a retable composed of seventy-three panels that condense recycled materials from the artist’s daily routines (notes, cuttings, photographs, wallpapers, etc.) along with texts (manuscript and printed) and annotations. It is a “collection of closed and sealed forms” that represents an attempt to construct a personal system of writing based on the transcription of texts, the use of Burroughsian cut-up technique, and the application of mathematical formulae and random procedures. Rather like an extraordinary diary that is prolonged in time, the piece begins on 01/23/97 with El nacimiento de la agricultura (The Birth of Agriculture) and concludes on 07/28/05 with the panel entitled El segundo nombre de las cosas (The Second Name of Things).8

This manner of proceeding, in which the production of works goes on for several years, has been a constant in his practice, and it also appears in other works like Los cantos de Maldoror (The Songs of Maldoror, 1997–2006), El jardín de las delicias (The Garden of Delights, 2011–16), and Libro para Manuel (El segundo nombre de las cosas) (Book for Manuel [The Second Name of Things], 2009–10), where he rewrites Julio Cortázar’s text published in 1973, once more combining it with photographs, notes, correspondence, and other textual fragments. Made up of thirty-three panels, the artist’s Libro para Manuel allows the viewer to read the text continuously while at the same time presenting itself as a succession of autonomous stories. Once more, it is in the (33) names of the episodes in this “duplicated” work that we find the entrances to the Historias secretas (Secret Histories) the artist weaves within himself: El blanco es siete afirma el cazador (The Target is Seven the Hunter A rms, 2009), El ángel se suicidó en Venecia en la hora de la bajamar dorada (The Angel Committed Suicide in Venice at the Hour of the Golden Low Tide, 2009), La gran polilla (The Great Moth, 2019), El punto de norma no es un huevo (The Vector Norm Is Not an Egg, 2009), Vive Mao (Mao Lives, 2009), Sara, o las desventuras de la virtud en América Central (Sara, or the Woes of Virtue in Central America, 2009), La ópera y el faro (The Opera and the Lighthouse, 2009), El horóscopo argentino (The Argentine Horoscope, 2009), Fósforos y hormigas (Matches and Ants, 2009), Sin novedad sobre las guerrilleras fugadas (No News of the Escaped Guerrillas, 2009), El punto de norma es un huevo (The Vector Norm Is an Egg, 2009), Un pingüino turquesa (A Turquoise Penguin, 2009), Balcones sobre el cementerio (Balconies over the Cemetery, 2009), Un asteroide o hasta las máquinas lunares fallan (An Asteroid or Even Moon Machines Fail, 2010), etc.9

Sanmiguel Diest shows an exceptional inclination and sympathy for the narrative forms of the Argentine writer, as well as great interest in his investigations of systems for the reading and reception of text. Cortázar is well known for his penchant for techniques of fragmentation and for the appearance in his pages of various materials, including newspaper articles, cuttings, or telegrams, whose reading is transferred to the characters in the book. This a nity leads the artist to appropriate other works by the writer, such as Rayuela (Hopscotch, 1963), a novel that starts by inviting the reader to choose between two possible ways of reading the text. Of these two books, “the first … ends with Chapter 56 … Consequently, the reader may ignore what follows with a clean conscience. The second should be read by beginning with Chapter 73 and then following the sequence indicated at the end of each chapter.” This is an active reading device that requires a reader who is an “accomplice” prepared to tackle unstable materials. Sanmiguel Diest appears to resurrect this system in his works by integrating technical resources that propose artifacts for an open and shifting reading. These are exercises in unauthorized co-authorship and, in this case, are not preceded by any prior instructions or indications on how they are to be read.

8 See Néstor Sanmiguel Diest: Las emociones barrocas, 1997–2005, exh. cat. Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (León: MUSAC, 2007).

9 See https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/collection/artwork/libro-manuel-segundo-nombre-cosas-book-manuelsecond-name-things.

3 The Second Name of Things

Is there any greater proof that the future is already written than the morning paper? Otherwise, how could exactly thirty-two pages of things happen every day? Such a tenacious and faultless mechanism can only be something highly premeditated; it is inconceivable that it should be improvised…

Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio10

While emblems, allegories, and initials already appear as habitual motifs in his earliest works, it was not until the 1990s that the artist regularly started to reproduce quotations, fragments, and whole books in his works, as he does with Cortázar. One of the first examples of this procedure is found in the series entitled Las olas (V. Woolf) (The Waves [V. Woolf], 1991), where he duplicates passages from this well-known work, stenciling the text letter by letter onto different sheets of paper. Once the copying is finished, the artist pours a paint used in the car industry onto each of the manuscript pieces, creating an archipelago of metallic islands. These are figures in a larger mapmaking process that announce the magnitude of his future work with overlapping and superimposition.

Continuing with this tendency toward repetition in his work, the writing of Woolf reappears in 1993 as part of the list of authors included in a small catalogue published for an exhibition held at the Casa de Cultura in Aranda de Duero under the title of Un nenúfar en el pulmón derecho (A Water Lily in the Right Lung),11 a phrase taken in this case from the writer Boris Vian. This publication includes episodes from works by Isidore Ducasse (The Songs of Maldoror), William Burroughs (Naked Lunch), Truman Capote (Music for Chameleons), and André Malraux (Anti-Memoirs), as well as the aforementioned works by Woolf (The Waves) and Cortázar (Hopscotch). Copying the text like a scribe thus becomes a way of approaching literature that bears no resemblance to the normal reading of a book. It is an unrepeatable experience determined by the (limited) series of movements performed by the artist to reproduce texts on the surfaces of his pieces. This operation of transference, he explains, “provokes a reading that requires a di erent rhythm, that completely transforms the interpretation of the writing.”12

Like many of his works, these ones contravene the immediacy and anxiety that permeate today’s forms of production and distribution. Sanmiguel Diest works from language, and he makes it explode in his images, inscribing them de facto within the genealogy of “anarchic freedom” that began with the modernist displacement between language and function. Following this critical tradition, he promotes the re-reading of codes imbued with the legacy of a modernism marked at di erent moments by the “secret dimension of language,”13 “its symbolic character,”14 and by the “mystique of language,”15 those “names which lie behind the words”16 with which the artist so insistently plays. In the same way, his strategies question assignations and filiations, o ering the possibility of a permeable cartography in which, by contrast with the single vision and solemnity of history writing, di erent knowledges and fields of sensitivity can be related. This is a radical attitude toward the logic of representation that questions “the classical order of knowledge” through a production that invites us to look closely at its stitching, to “read the image and see the word.”17

12 Conversation with Néstor Sanmiguel Diest, Vitoria-Gasteiz, June 19, 2022.

13 Gershom Scholem, “The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbala (Parts 1 and 2),” trans. Simon Pleasance, Diogenes 20, no. 79 (September 1972): 59–80; no. 80 (December 1972): 164–94, here 61.

14 Ibid., 165.

15 Ibid., 70.

16 Ibid., 178.

17 Fernando Rodríguez de la Flor, Emblemas. Lecturas de la imagen simbólica (Madrid: Alianza Forma, 1995).

As others had done before him, Sanmiguel Diest acts like a thief of quotations who mechanically reproduces what is written and opposes it to the discipline of history. He reveals himself as that “pearl seeker” who gives another of his works its title, and which is an erroneous appropriation of the name of “pearl fisherman” assigned by Hannah Arendt to another passionate collector of the last century, Walter Benjamin. Conscious of the writer’s maxim that when any object is separated from its context it is preserved and destroyed in a single movement, Sanmiguel Diest also plunges into the depths of the past to retrieve—following Arendt—those crystallized “fragments of thought.” Evoked, fractioned, or exactly replicated, the sources pointed to by the artist include (besides those already mentioned) the names of writers and poets like Isidore Ducasse, William Burroughs, André Malraux, Ursula K. Le Guin, Tom Wolfe, and Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio; artists like Joan Miró, Francis Picabia, Ellsworth Kelly, Rosemarie Trockel, Jean Arp, Jackson Pollock, Tim Rollins & K.O.S. (Kids of Survival), and Bridget Riley, and music bands like Joy Division, Sonic Youth, Nurse With Wound, and Smashing Pumpkins. This is merely the tip of an iceberg, hidden beneath which is a production based on constant negotiation between these authorized voices and those that apparently refer us to the most trivial, insignificant, and everyday things.

It is from the eclecticism of his sources and his games with language that the titles of his works seem to emerge. They function as aphorisms and (telegraphic) manifestos that o er unexpected signs and indices as supports for deciphering the artist’s challenges: Sol del mediodía. La revolución (Midday Sun: The Revolution, 1989), La luna está de viaje (The Moon Is on Its Travels, 1993), Las tres gracias como tuneladoras (The Three Graces as Tunnelers, 1993), Pequeño Dios dinamitero (Small Dynamiter God, 1993), Ningún sitio invulnerable (No Invulnerable Place, 1997), En un bosque cercano a Ekaterinburgo (In a Forest near Ekaterinburg, 1999), El Gobierno retira su proyecto (The Government Withdraws Its Project, 1999), Triángulo de amor bizarro (Bizarre Love Triangle, 1999), El suicidio de Lucrecia (The Suicide of Lucretia, 2000), La calle del desconcierto (The Street of Uneasiness, 2003), El arte de esquivar (The Art of Dodging, 2004), Los sentimientos no expresados del lehendakari (The Basque President’s Unexpressed Sentiments, 2004), Reconocimiento del discurso (Recognition of Discourse, 2005), Belleville y el melodrama del hallazgo y las verduras (Belleville and the Melodrama of the Discovery and the Vegetables, 2007), Las fuerzas sutiles (The Subtle Forces, 2007), Franz en América o el desaparecido (Franz in America or the Missing Person, 2008), Se alquila local en Queens (Commercial Premises for Rent in Queens, 2008), Drôle de guerre (2009), Lista rectificada de fugados (Corrected List of Escapees, 2009), Las novias excluidas (The Excluded Brides,

2011), Burgueses, proletarios y comunistas (Bourgeois, Proletarians, and Communists, 2012), El cactus enamorado (The Enamored Cactus, 2013), Las bodas químicas (The Chemical Wedding, 2014), Dada en Marte (Dada on Mars, 2015), El milagro de Lerma (The Miracle of Lerma, 2015), El manifiesto de Buenos Aires (The Buenos Aires Manifesto, 2015), Zara en Manhattan (Zara in Manhattan, 2016), Las colinas de Apollinaire (The Hills of Apollinaire, 2017), La central lechera y los alfabetos (The Dairy and the Alphabets, 2018), En algún lugar se está muriendo uno de los nuestros (Somewhere One of Our People Is Dying, 2018), Dios estaba sentado en su camajaula (God Was Sitting in His Bed-Cage, 2019), Sobrevolando la tarde con Sonic Youth, Truman Capote y otras cosas (Flying Over the Afternoon with Sonic Youth, Truman Capote, and Other Things, 2019), Masturbarse con piedras (Masturbating with Stones, 2020), and so on.

4 Guide for the Perplexed

Fabricated from language, the machines are this act of fabrication; they originate within themselves: between their tubes, their arms, their cogwheels, their metal constructions, they enclose the process in which they are contained. They thus give the process a presence without perspective. It is assigned a place outside of space since it serves as its own location; its dwelling place is its surroundings, hidden by its own visibility.

Michel Foucault18

It is commonly asserted that we live in an era when “language itself has been put to work,”19 while economic and political analyses unceasingly expand their field toward everything related with cognition, memory, and communication. It is a time when representation covers everything, and this everything is presented in the company of a calculated excitement and an ideal of transparency where misunderstanding has disappeared, since access to the other is at once instantaneous and complete.

Sanmiguel Diest ironically problematizes this horizon of presentism from what he calls his “obsession with simultaneous occurrences,” a recurrent habit that is easily traced in his images: “whole pages with things that are happening at the same time. It’s more easily done in literature. In painting, the way of doing it is like accommodating lines and lines in more complicated pieces, with superimpositions; every layer is a kilo of information, but the function is that it should all be simultaneous.”20 Against the accessible narrative, the normative, and the standardized, the artist counterposes qualities like opacity, instability, and discontinuity. To return to his own words, “If I make a mistake with the spelling, I don’t retouch it. But there are times when you fall asleep writing. You’re there sleeping as you write, and the letters get smaller, and then…”21

Revealing the constructive strategies of Sanmiguel Diest always requires extraordinary attention. Decoding the sum of referents that settle on the surfaces of his canvases demands a curiosity proportional to that invested in their execution. Wary of the idea of applying an isolated method, he frequently obscures his movements one behind the other, as though the whole thing were a huge joke about the “transparency of language” and its mythologies.

As indicated by the title of one of his most singular pieces, La máquina soltera (The Bachelor Machine, 1996), a collage made by mutilating the Sunday supplement of a national newspaper, his production inclines toward a condensation of language and the invention of artifacts that fold back on themselves. Following the modern habit of impugning the mystification of the artist’s gesture, his images are organized in accordance with metrical and mathematical formulae, using mechanisms of chance that determine their logic of growth (although on various occasions, the artist has also referred to the use of charms and witchcraft). To the treatment of text as line and color (many of the lines in his drawings are executed in blue ballpoint pen, forming thick networks that turn into compact masses), he adds the techniques learned as a painter and from his years of training as a couturier: “first the structures are created, then one has to linger over the composition and the rhythms of reading that are going to guide the reader on a journey through the works, and then drawing and color … an imperfect system designed to be broken when best suited.”22

21 Ibid.

Superimpositions, maskings, deviations, rhythms, symmetries, inversions… All the product of the use of runes, dice, cards from di erent packs, or dominoes, the instruments authorized to decide the almost imperceptible modifications that succeed one another in his compositions. The permutations and exchanges signaled by these objects when activated by the artist multiply their formal and discursive patterns and provide an aleatory resolution for the evolution of his figures and compositions. Such constructive strategies question notions like those of authority and authorship, and the figure of the artist finally ceases to be the ultimate repository of nonmechanical virtues (authenticity, spontaneity, the fetish, etc.) and inserts his practice in a system open to the dynamism of repetition and automatism.

In this way, entering the systems deployed by the artist to organize his production requires abandoning any expectation of finding a predetermined order, an e ective model of reading. This is perhaps why his images challenge us to retrace our steps at every instant in the corridors of his lair. To return to the literary simile, we might borrow the words with which Deleuze and Guattari explain the Kafkian refuge in their analysis of the work of the Czech writer:

We will be trying to discover what other points our entrance connects to, what crossroads and galleries one passes through to link two points, what the map of the rhizome is and how the map is modified if one enters by another point. Only the principle of multiple entrances prevents the introduction of the enemy, the Signifier and those attempts to interpret a work that is actually only open to experimentation.23

Someone who enters the work of Sanmiguel Diest is (also) destined to take a chain of choices, to opt between alternatives that are never exhausted. This breaking of bounds can sometimes disconcert us, leading to a state of perplexity that we enter as a result of its excesses: “Perplexity is produced when knowledge is such that it leaves a margin for risk, when we have to take a risk when choosing,”24 to recall María Zambrano’s description of the experience of this state. In the same way, the work of Sanmiguel Diest is activated only in that “taking a risk when choosing” between the revelations and absences that cluster inside it. It is a “great machine” that insists on the search for a personal vocabulary with which to find other angles to approach the “simultaneous presents” that so obsess the artist.

Peio Aguirre