IN THE PAINTING FACTORY

That the world remains to be read basically means that an Other, on the other side, transcribes the given objects, and that with the appropriate point of view I could theoretically decipher it.

Jean-François Lyotard1

Work and non-work: here is a “revolutionary” theme.

Jean Baudrillard2

It all begins with a visit to the artist’s studio on the outskirts of Aranda de Duero. There, works produced in the course of several decades are carefully stacked. The rooms are organized according to the activity carried out in each: the studio properly speaking; the storage shelves; the little room with the books, catalogues, and CDs; and the room for resting, eating, and hospitably welcoming guests. The studio functions as a factory of a very special character. It is here that Néstor Sanmiguel Diest spends his working day, his statutory eight hours and often quite a lot more. His connection with this place makes him what is commonly known, with no prejudice whatsoever, as a “studio artist.” This place is essential when it comes to forging an artistic personality. There he amalgamates all the material and content he is able to assimilate: philosophical and literary readings, his own militant biography, current politics, TV and print news, all together with his innermost drives, which are channeled through the slow exercise of painting. The amalgamation of content is also one of forms; the weight of time produces plastic and graphic events, singularities of the visible.

Sanmiguel Diest uses painting as a palimpsest, applying materials on top of one another to generate layers of acrylic, graphite, dissolvent, pen, and varnishes that solidify and homogenize the successive sediments in a consistent plane or image. Besides liquid paints and inks, he also uses newspapers, photographs, notebooks and diaries, industrial reports, mail, handwritten or typed texts, ink pads, and so forth. All this stratification, this thickness in the system rather than on the inscribable surface of the canvas, is thrust at once upon the viewer, simultaneously revealing and hiding a series of pictorial texts or tales that activate the hunger to decode. The artist-subject reveals and betrays himself. Inside every palimpsest are strategies of camouflage and concealment, introspection and revelation.

Although his beginnings in the art world date back to the 1970s, it was in the early 1990s that he embarked on his singular artistic course, perfecting and developing various techniques for the mechanization (automation?) of his art. The artist we now know begins on a twenty-year basis of working both individually and collectively. From 1985 to 1996 he formed part of the collective A Ua Crag in Aranda de Duero, which he had helped to found. Until he was finally able to live o painting, Néstor combined his artistic activity with his work at a textile factory in Burgos, and he dedicated himself fully to art only after the year 2000. His past as a pattern designer in the textile industry has marked his artistic production by feeding it with languages where systematic thought, sequences of patterns and dies, and quasi-mathematical symmetries and rhythms acquire a significant weight in the definition of the structures in his pictures.

The move from factory to art involves a series of conceptual and also symbolic transfers. It is not by chance that the word fabric in English refers to cloth. Historically, the great industrialization seen by the eyes of Karl Marx was punctuated by the insistently repetitive sound of the sewing machines and great looms that spread from Manchester to the whole of Europe. The parallels between “manual” activities considered antithetical in terms of “labor” may point us toward correlations and connections between art and industry. One might perhaps o er a materialist description of the “work of art” in the oeuvre of Sanmiguel Diest. To begin with, this artisanal mechanization of painting has led him to a methodical systematization of production: the construction of stretchers, devices for hanging the canvases, platform lifts to reach the corners, large tables for horizontal work, stores of large quantities of paint and brushes, as well as pens, ink pads, erasers, and papers. From his days in the textile industry, the artist has retained a certain preference for the print and the transfer of content to another type of cloth, now tensed on the stretcher. In all his painting, there is a desire to inscribe, stamp, and print that recalls the graphic arts. Mastery at pasting and flattening collages is here related to handicrafts or décor (a xing wallpaper, for example). Everything that surrounds him is used for DIY-style production. Free from the “ties” of salaried work, he now devotes all his energies to what is a priori the non-alienated labor of art. However, there is no trace here of the worker’s aesthetic, but something much subtler, closer to the operators on the textile dissection table, an industrialized method on the level of form rather than content.

In any case, the combination of factory labor with the making of art is liable to generate a constant negotiation in any practitioner between one place and another, between two di erent kinds of “workshop.” In the two spheres, the economy of time and physical e ort is very di erent. A fantasy common to these two separate realities would consist of imagining one world inside the other, with the resources of one work in the other: the application of the freedom and creativity of art to the factory, or, by contrast, perhaps some kind of utility for the repetitive and mechanical gestures of industry in the work of art. In the factory, the mind of the operator (or skilled worker) dreams of that whole imaginary universe of forms and signs. This fantasy (or phantasme, as the French say) would be congregated as a psychological necessity in all those factory leftovers, the excess materials or scraps, that can perform another parallel function in the world of artistic practice. This “waste” that ends up in the garbage might have another useful surplus value. Such scraps are not patterns but simply pieces left over from a fabric or a metal plate that, when manipulated mentally and outside their context, are able to acquire a new role. Di erent utopias could then be imagined. In the artist’s studio, the dehumanization of the assembly line would be transformed into a pleasant exercise, and the division of labor would be abolished in favor of a complete control of production.

In Sanmiguel Diest’s work, it is not hard to discern abstracted motifs of what appear to be chains and links, cogs and teeth, wing nuts, spikes and levers, di erent pumping systems, and “connectors” and joints. All this lies alongside organisms and cells that seem to have been microscopically enlarged for our gaze. What is intuited in all these figures is another type of “factory,” namely what in the jargon of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would be the “machine rooms” or “machinic devices” of the unconscious. However, before dwelling on the psychic, let us concentrate on this idea of the “joint”—the sewing together of cloths or the welding of metal plates—which links or attaches the di erent fragments and integrates them in a common background that contains them. What thus emerges is one of the most recurrent dialectics in this context, the nearly always irresolvable relationship between background and figure that organizes the intensities, rhythms, and force lines as a negotiation between planes, signifiers, and signifieds. Like a tailor with a large pair of scissors, the artist cuts out signs that surge up from the depths of his imagination. These figure-forms are spontaneous, strange, anarchic, and schizoid. The machine and the hand, industry and handicrafts, the tool and the pattern engage in a loving relationship. The trace of the artisan’s hand lives together with rulers and triangles. Compasses draw circles ceaselessly. The painter’s body is not absent, but rather also amalgamated in the material, in all the hours accumulated in each picture.

There are artists who waste their time in the studio, reading, watching movies, chatting to visitors, taking naps, making productivity a state of active rest that eventually bears fruit in the form of artworks. There are other artists for whom going to the studio is an everyday gymnastic exercise, a connection with discipline (in a generally post-disciplinary society), a re-encounter with a new working day where there is no grand objective, no lurking masterpiece, but simply doing with no goal other than carrying out another day’s work. Néstor belongs to this second type of artist. Painting is discourse when it comes into contact with the superstructure of art, but, in the interim, it is a blind activity with large doses of pointlessness or even idiocy. In the studio, he works laboriously without rest, and this slowness ends up generating his figure-forms. On the basis of a vocabulary made to his own measure, his painting accumulates layers with techniques he invented and perfected whose e ectiveness (and longevity) are beyond all doubt. This lengthening of the working process defies the economic logic of the exploitation of capital in which production is minimized by the rationalization of time, expenditure, and e ort. With Sanmiguel Diest, methodological mechanization is not aimed at finishing the picture as quickly as possible, but at producing the largest possible number of pictures, each with an incalculable or ridiculous time within it. What in the specific language of the history of painting was the patina, is here no more than immanent (or perhaps magnetized) time, thickened and condensed.

What we have here is a productivist, and this posits the dialectic of quantity and quality as a mode of production and aesthetics in its own right. Taking the logic of production to its extreme would then consist of that “making constant” where quantity becomes quality. This productivism is an aesthetic event. All the hours spent in the studio produce no profitable surplus value for the capital, but only for himself. However, every palimpsest is moreover a temporal density, an accumulation of material and information. In the pictorial medium, the nonprofitable use of time becomes the very reason for the act of painting itself, so that wasting time or using it unproductively, even if consciously, becomes an act of resistance, a way of being in life and in art.

Libidinal Economies

This “factory” is full of “mother forms,” as he calls those figure-forms that occupy the central space of many of his pictures. They are nearly always surrounded by other attached satellite forms together with profuse marginal annotations, almost footnotes. I am thinking here of Las emociones barrocas (The Baroque Emotions, 1997–2005), a set of works where geometries and organisms are aligned with a whole poetics of the fragment. The figures float as though in an amniotic fluid, which is the background, like interconnected organs. The “machine room” to which I referred above is the one described by Deleuze and Guattari in AntiOedipus, with “desiring-machines” made of couplings and “bodies without organs,” as in the book’s impetuous opening: “It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts.”3 Transferring these words to the artist’s oeuvre, what emerges timidly is the Freudian sex drive or death drive on the verge of overflowing. One then intuits the Surrealism of an André Breton or the most machinic and mechanomorphic Francis Picabia. The factory of the phantasm becomes the workshop of the dream. The surplus value of the factory is here a surplus of enjoyment or jouissance

When the philosophy of desire and the factory come into contact, they unleash what Jean-François Lyotard, in one of those unclassifiable texts that hack their way through the undergrowth to reinvent an entire lexicon, called “libidinal economy,” a philosophy of society and theory of “intensities” and libidinal energies.4 The works of Sanmiguel Diest seem to reflect this power, this desiring force. A sketchbook of drawings made between 1991 and 1993 provides a magnificent example of this, an inexhaustible catalogue of “mother forms.” With work carried out between August 1991 and December 30, 1993, the sketchbook includes the following series of drawings: Tiempo de espera (Waiting Time, August 1991), Buch der Lieder (Book of Songs, 1991), Versión celeste (Celestial Version, 1992), Corazón traidor (Treacherous Heart, 1993), El ángel caído (The Fallen Angel, 1993). The notebook is a whole laboratory of ideas where forms sketched with ballpoint pen and correction fluid alternate with sketches, notes about things to do, the shopping list, accounts, and anything else that occupied the everyday life of the artist in those years. These are drawings that precede or directly germinate into what would later become the series we mentioned earlier, Las emociones barrocas 5 It is rather like the notebook of a scientist or an engineer whose inventions are unknown to us. Each page is stamped with the artist’s postal address in Aranda de Duero. It is an author’s mark of selfa rmation; an index, a trace of his desire for inscription. The machinic and the libidinal coexist indistinctly on these squared pages where he gives free rein to his imagination. A drawing in the Corazón traidor series is especially intriguing in this regard: a mechanical artifact drawn in black ballpoint pen, with its wheel and levers coupled to a lateral bar and another semi-geometric form brandishing a reddish “sausage truncheon,” which looks as if it is about to start up and commence raining blows left and right.6 Its hypothetical functioning is merely dreamlike, like that of a bricoleur Picabia. It is the rack of torture and the disciplinary rhythm of the factory converted into some recondite sexual fantasy. In contact with painting, every delirium finds a stable and healthy form.

4 Jean-François Lyotard, Économie libidinale (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1974); Eng.: Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).

5 There is a facsimile version of this sketchbook entitled Cuaderno de notas y dibujos, NSD nº2_91.93, published by La Casa Cromática and edited by Alejandro Martínez Parra, 2019.

Margins of Painting

Néstor was never an “emerging” artist and never benefited from promotion for the simple reason that in those (final) days of the dictatorship and first years of the political transition, none of that existed. He has long remained on the periphery of success, and this marginality has provided him over the years with a distance from any orthodoxy. Self-education also tends to be an indication of social class. His is a heterodox practice where discipline does not stem from any sense of fidelity, closing of ranks, or tradition. On the contrary, the artist’s philias are many and varied, with even some postmodern moments among them, such as the spontaneity of the unconscious bubble-gum expressionism of Jonathan Lasker, or the pictorial and allegorical conceptualism of Tim Rollins & K.O.S. (Kids of Survival), an educational experiment of the translation to painting of Western literature carried out by young students and artists in New York’s Bronx. Rather than a rara avis, he is an artist of his own species.

Painting on the margins and also of the margins, there is an absolute awareness here of the edges of the canvas as the limit of representation. Approaching the materiality of the canvas consists first of looking at the edges, which always reveal valuable information about what is happening on the surface. From the corners to the center, and from there back to the perimeter of the surface. As I have pointed out, Sanmiguel Diest is a method artist. He puts his thought on a grid, distancing himself from the romantic vision of artistic inspiration and the ingenuousness of “creation.” This grid optimizes the movements, gestures, and rituals in the plastic event. He often starts from numerical or algorithmic systems he invents himself. He is systematic, but not in the sense of the cold systems of Minimalism, with their expanded color fields and formal reductionism, but repetitively insistent on his particular horror vacui, on the density, abundance, and saturation of traced lines that delimit fragmented spaces of geometric abstraction stripped of adornments and ornamentation. Instead of the straight line of intentions, the result is always the consequence of a set of rules, impositions, and dead ends, but also of detours, ruses, and “trademark” resources. One aspect to bear in mind here is the distance of the hand from the support of the picture, which is not necessarily correlative with the distance of the eye from the picture surface. These pictures look as if they have been painted from very close up, but as we move away, we perceive more and more things. They activate the zoom of the human eye, and permit di erent levels of information to be “read” at each distance. This would contrast with the works of Mondrian, which look as though they were painted from a distance, but have to be viewed from close up so as not to see the edges of the canvas. Painting is essentially an art of the retina that requires attention.

Signic Universe

Néstor Sanmiguel Diest recognizes the power and influence of semiotic codes on life. He generates signs rather than symbols. He concentrates more on the signifiers than on signification. The signs are aimed at the eye and form a sort of nonverbal language, an idiolect or vocabulary adapted by the subject to express its being in the world. We live in the midst of signs, which constitute us and on the basis of which we socialize. On some occasion, Néstor has said of the elongation of time in his painting that “only the present exists.” This resounds upon reading Margins of Philosophy, where Jacques Derrida says that the sign “is usually said to be put in the place of the thing itself, the present thing, ‘thing’ here standing equally for meaning or referent.… When we cannot grasp or show the thing, state the present, the being-present, when the present cannot be presented, we signify, we go through the detour of the sign. We take or give signs. We signal. The sign, in this sense, is deferred presence.”7 What is writing but constant signaling? Perhaps pure imaginary fabrication of language?

One habitual strategy in his works consists of minutely “plagiarizing” literature textbooks on handwritten or typed sheets that he pastes very carefully to the surface of the painting, adding a layer or background. He sometimes writes directly by hand on the canvases with the aid of marked lines. He makes notebooks out of canvases. Manuscript painting. Like the Pierre Menard who conscientiously copies out Cervantes’s Don Quixote in the story by Jorge Luis Borges, the artist is here neither a writer (écrivain) nor even writing (écrivant), but a simple copyist, a scribe, a mere reproducer of signifiers. Dead letters. Articulated signification is subordinated to plastic meaning. Sentences become letter-lines. The overall work then resembles a medieval codex where there is something to be deciphered in every detail. It thus provides an entry to the complexity of linguistics, writing, and the sign, to the semiotics of Gestalt, the point, the line, and the surface. “The figure-form is the presence of nonlanguage in language.”8 The letter acts like a glaze on the background, a mimicry and gesturality deprived of epic qualities. He is a maker of signs in the midst of a libidinal (rather than political) economy of the sign.

He does not impose a single interpretation or a closed meaning on any of his works. On the contrary, he leaves that responsibility to the viewer. He rather assimilates many of the demands of poststructuralist philosophy by appropriating, in his own way, the semiotic, desiring, anti-systemic, schizoid, and anarcho-liberal discoveries of its now famous French philosophical instigators. Politically speaking, he “takes a stand for the figural,” meaning for desire (as Lyotard said) instead of the discursive. Figural thought makes the materiality of the image, its plasticity and thickness, into a privileged object of study. Sanmiguel Diest takes part in that “adventure of the sign” that, together with Marxist residues and a psychoanalytical impulse, helps to clarify a little further the irreducible undecidability of the world. His is, let us reiterate, a desiring practice.