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La pasta, como bien sabemos, es una sustancia compacta, pero al mismo tiempo dócil. Pudiéramos suponerla como un fluido vago y lento si la estirásemos meticulosamente hasta convertirla en un hilo fino y endeble. En todo caso, siempre será algo moldeable que nunca alcanzará la condición líquida de lo que se filtra, penetra y humedece los fundamentos más sólidos. Por tanto, no es el río que fluye siempre distinto, ni la marea periódica que desgasta milímetro a milímetro las superficies. Tampoco es el torrente desbordado que arrastra a su paso todo lo que encuentra, cruzándose con otras corrientes y creando sucesos internos cada vez más dinámicos. Como esas imágenes, son también las primeras series de marchas en tubos antropomorfizados, creadas por René Francisco. En ellas percibíamos el poder aún latente de una masa sin guía y sin rumbo, pero todavía activa, capaz de fluir y transformar, renovar y cambiar, transferir y propagar. Sin embargo, todos esos valores pierden su intensidad al devenir en una cosa pegajosa, lánguida y viscosa como la pasta. Una mutación similar opera en la masa humana que explora este artista en su producción más reciente. Bajo el título Pasta cortada agrupa una serie de obras cuya gramática intenta revelar diferentes niveles de transición entre la masa activa y la masa pasiva. Para René Francisco, observador tenaz de los comportamientos grupales, la pasta es la sustancia que mejor encarna, simbólicamente, la paradoja de individuos agrupados en la inercia de un ritual social que ha perdido orientación y sentido. Es la masa estática, incapacitada para fluir, la masa que perdió su propia dinámica interna y su razón de ser. A diferencia de la muchedumbre de Entre nosotros (II parte) que se propaga como un rizoma, alerta, sensible al calor interpersonal y al roce turbador de los cuerpos, capaz de renunciar a las consignas y deponer las pancartas, contagiar a los otros e incitar la gran sedición erótica, la masa que se transforma en “pasta cortada” es la que ha perdido esencialmente su autonomía. Como esos productos alimenticios que esperan el momento final de la cocción, así espera impávida esta multitud. Entonces, de la masa fluida y armónica pasamos a una masa plástica devenida en conjunto sistemático de puntos pastosos. Son los tubos que se vacían dejando sus huellas, punto a punto, en el lienzo y, al mismo tiempo, desapareciendo en su propia abstracción. Ahora esa masa es una cosa recortada, nos hace observar René Francisco, segmentada en trozos, fácilmente divisible e incapaz de reaccionar a los estímulos. Es algo que ha llegado al punto muerto de la inercia que marca el postergado fin de una historia. Vaciada de sentido, apagada para siempre, es la masa desconectada del motor generador y activo que propiciaba la evolución progresiva de los grandes relatos históricos. Reducida a los contornos ambiguos de su circunstancia incierta, no espera nada ni se inquieta por lo que no llega. Sigue ahí, sobreviviendo como un objeto pasivo sin entender los campos cada vez más amplios del presente, aceptando con resignada presencia los compartimentos, las parcelaciones, los fraccionamientos, las divisiones y subdivisiones, las des-localizaciones y las globalizaciones. ======= English =======
The pasta cortada of René Francisco
The spanish word pasta - which can be translated variously as paste, dough, pasta, pulp, etc. - is a generic term which refers to substances characterised by their semi-fluid state. Solid yet malleable, without definite shape, yet capable of being assuming an infinitely variety of forms - it is this permanently ambivalent, viscid quality of pasta which for Rene Francisco makes it such an apt metaphor for the nature of the individual as constituent of a greater societal mass.
The dual nature of our existence as both unique individuals but at the same time inescapably members of greater social constituencies has long been a central concern of the work of Rene Francisco. Born and educated in post-revolutionary Cuba Francisco is himself a product of a society founded on the beliefs of mass allegiance and mass behaviour.
In the late 90s Francisco seized upon the humble toothpaste tube as raw material and metaphor for multiple series of work, in which the tubes, shaped into implausibly lifelike anthropomorphic figures, represent man-in-the-mass. With virtuosic inventiveness, Fransisco has created objects, drawings, paintings and installations in which his toothpaste figures enact the drama of mass existence.
In the Cuban context, the tubes carry specific meanings. Since the revolution of 1959, toothpaste – like much else – is rationed. Later, due to the economical crisis of the 80s, the toothpaste tubes lost their original colors and painted lettering, acquiring the anonymous appearance that one sees in Francisco´s work. The tubes with which Francisco creates some of his pieces, such as Entre Nosotros, are collected from friends and acquaintances in Havana. The resulting works literally embody the socio-political realities of the life of the mass of Cuban people. Not only are the figures headless but empty - of ideals or personal conviction.
The new series of works, pasta cortada, explore the metaphor of this lost content. Pasta, an amorphous mass, intrinsically alterable, maipulable, solidifiable. It shares the characteristics of fluid. In other works Francisco also uses the metaphor of water as body, constituted from innumerable droplets, and susceptible to the slightest influence, to dilution and to division.
Pasta however is neither solid nor fluid, possessing qualities of both. For him it perhaps best embodies the characteristic of group behaviour, turned sluggish and hardened by social rituals which have lost their meaning. It is the mass in extasis, no longer capable of flow, of change, the mass that has lost its autonomy and therefore its reason for being. In contrast to the body which, capable of rejecting orders and discarding its placards, can propagate itself rhizome-like, with sensitivity to its environment, responsive to the warmth of others and to the friction of bodies, pasta cortada is the mass which has lost its vitality.
Fransisco’s paintings are another example of the way his choice of materials and technique frequently embody the meaning of his pieces. His extraordinary technique of painting only with a spatula and without frottage in a coarse pointillist style emphasises the invividual (the points of paint) versus mass (the picture in its entirety). A further significance is also implicit in the ease with which the eye is deceived by the artifice of the painting – the political metaphor does need emphasising.
The innumerable points on his canvases can be seen as the extruded pasta of the tubes: point by point they are absorbed onto the canvas, disappearing in the the ensuing abstraction, hardening into a fixed image. For Francisco the ensuing mass is segmented, chopped up into pieces, each cut off from and incapable of reacting to the other. It is a mass which has reached the final condition of stasis, frozen in time, awaiting the long postponed final chapter of its story.
Empty of feeling, incapable of change, without hope of, nor even concern for, what will now never arrive, it is a body disconnected from the (re)generative forces which give rise to genuine historical change. It survives as a hypertrophied organism without comprehension of its future, resignedly accepting its stasis and the innumerable blind allies, cul-de-sacs, disvisons and sub-divisions of is fractured existence.
Translation and adaption: Ian Meiklejohn
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