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Untitled
Original title: Sin título
1995
Black and white photograph
Dimensions: Diptych: 166 x 272 cm
Reference: ACF0613
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The main support for coherence in the work of José María Guijarro is its deliberate distance from both formalism and the standardised model of the artist. Indeed, his pieces cannot be called "pretty" and he makes a living from work that has nothing to do with art. From the outset he was interested in the application of logic to art and the transformation of language, through repetition, for the visual representation of mathematical proportions. The "Kant Series", one of his first pieces, used a fragment of text from the introduction to The Critique of Pure Reason: "Wenn man die…" ("If one…"), to which he gave the value 100 (100 letters) and then separated into proportions, for example, into three blocks: 40%, 30%, and 30%, which he applied to pieces of white pressed wood, old wood, parts of a door, etc. In 1994 he carried out a similar operation with the words that begin Hegel's The Science of Logic: "Es fühlt sich…" (One feels…), using as a rule for formation the numerical relations 2-5-3, which correspond to the number of letters in each word. 87, 52 y 83, done with small fragments of iron tube, arranges those numbers of fragments in three rows on the wall, with no pretension to aesthetic harmony of any kind; this is a visual presentation of a private joke. The numbers correspond to Marilyn Monroe's vital statistics in centimetres. Their rough presence on the wall, with no relation to the idea of female beauty, shifts their meaning and douses venereal imagination in order to turn on the lights of the logic of social conventions. Untitled is an ordered compilation of photographs that blindly follow the movements of a hand -a piece from the same series does the same thing with the gestures of a mouth-, taken whilst their owner was reciting a poem. The lyric of the verse disappears after the reiteration and vacuum of meaning of dumb gestures, reduced to pure hand waving. In the text mentioned above, Guijarro externalises his intentions in these words: "I've always liked what Wittgenstein says in the Tractatus: language is a painting of the world. The original language was spoken language, writing came later, and, in addition to the words, rhythm, intonation and melody are significant in speaking. That is my pretext for the photographs of the speaking of the verses by Alberti, César Vallejo or Miguel Hernández."

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