SOC/COS
Lisanne Nadeau
From within his native language, Anton Roca, through a skilful subterfuge, has found and reveal to us the conceptual symmetry which lies behind his whole body of work. In the vast range of materials and signs woven together in his art, the motivation behind every act seems in fact to be found in this basic axis of meaning: being and body. Likewise, it is at the outset only fair to say that all Anton Roca's work has been and continues to be committed to the pursuit of a profound reflection upon the identity of the contemporary subject whereby the body remains the principal vehicle.
It can be stated without any doubt that in this brand-new exhibition the artist is really inviting us to revisit the very sources of the questioning in which he is still engaged, developed with a fascinating coherence in the course of the last twenty years. A temporal return, it is true, while he comes back to the city which saw the awakening of his visual sensitivity and language, but also a return to the very heart of an artistic practice marked by a confident maturity and a still unsatisfied art's needs for attainment. The aim therefore is to create a concentrated, condensed event, wherein the Tinglado (a former customs shed converted into an exhibition space) serves as an excuse to review basic elements, the essential features of his work. Using the venue of the Tinglado, here in Tarragona, using his own cultural setting in this physical space loaded with memory and multiple connotations, represents a key moment in this long journey, in this quest the extent and cohesion of which can be seen here. SOC/COS, reflecting both accurately and extremely judiciously the main factors involved in a body of work which is both fertile and plural, defines a vocabulary, strategies and a grammar, but also the starting points for a constant questioning.
First of all, above all, there is the body, bodies. His - the artist's - and then others, to which he attaches himself, which he rubs to and merges with and with which he negotiates frontiers. These bodies certainly had to take their place, to give rise to a series of strategic positions. Anton Roca came to inhabit this space in the Tinglado, as his latest home. In the same way, the approach in situ to SOC/COS reveals the venue's profound suitability for the defining purpose of Roca's work. Anton Roca has chosen to give a metaphorical value to the Tinglado's architectural features, these vast spaces and monumental openings. "Self access" and "inner space" are the chosen, defining images which configure the space and highlight it.
Since the artist's very first performances in the 1980's, the body has been exploited as a central feature, an essential but anonymous marker defining individual territory. The body as a zone for interaction, a pole of attraction or repulsion. The body also as a threshold, a place of transit, at once a moment of incarnation and a zone with fluctuating borders, crossed right through by the space in which it tries to position itself for a time.
In this light, it is no surprise to see the topic of movement becoming a leitmotiv. And among all the bodies portrayed, among these states of transformation and mouvance, we find the photographic portrayal of the Straits of Gibraltar and the Pillars of Hercules, in an explicit reference to the idea of movement, but more specifically to the concept of passage, marked by unknowns and possibilities. Thus, this visually sparse image, this landscape which is at once simple and vast, inserted almost surreptitiously into the exhibition space, is therefore loaded down with meaning. A single gesture, then, marked by this spirit of synthesis, this denseness already mentioned above in the context of this exhibition at the Tinglado, Tarragona. The Straits of Gibraltar, the gateway between East and West and, by extension, between old and new worlds, a legendary spot which also represents the furthest point of the travels of Ulysses. This picture as the very idea of the horizon to be reached, a threshold that signifies for the Westerner, the European that Anton Roca is, the very act of going beyond oneself. Has Anton Roca himself not worked, in a different context, with the image of Ithaca?
From body to landscape is therefore a remarkable adequacy of geographic and identity which the artist presents to us. A wonderful allegory of constant departures, of an identity in flux, of the paradoxical to and fro between oneself and the other, of alternating returns and flights. In an acceptance of these easily grasped but transitory states which mark the human path.
Anton Roca has always taken the path of engaging himself as an identifiable, identified body within the movement of his work, feeding it upon his own experience. However, no subjective narrative can emerge from here other than for the past. The artist's body becomes a safe place for the experience the first, a chosen viewpoint, the only viewpoint possible, the only possible place to question and search. Not the I, not the place of declaration, but the place, indefinable by the artist, from which the world can be questioned.
The body remains, then, a participant in a process of temporary location. The video projection shows a chained fusion of a series of faces with different racial features in proof of this crossing over of appearances, within these wholly externalised bodies, the purport of which is put into question. The body, our body on the artist's own terms, do not belong to us but comes out, through contrast or similarity ways, from the expansion of other bodies which surround it.
Transitory, diaphanous, ephemeral bodies, they play the part of infinite mutations within the nomadic subject themself. In the in situ project, taken as a whole, the idea of mirror-clothe stands out as the ultimate effect in this expanding of surrounding bodies. The mirror-clothe was the tool for an urban action conceived specifically for the Tinglado event. The paradox of a body/being whose movements are visible, allowing itself to be penetrated from all directions while remaining inexorably untouchable. A glinting, immaterial form, a confused view, yet more symbols of the being/body in transformation.
But even here, in this urban action by Anton Roca, can we make any claim to a lasting corporality? Are we not in the presence of an expanse of space, without borders? A body without organs, a state of space beneath form itself. And here one moves on to a completely new dichotomy: no longer the conjugation of being/body, but the stubborn distinction and tension between a body and its skin. Of the expanse, this as yet unformed surface is a membrane, the presence of which is no more than an interruption in the path of things.
This strange repoussoir effect results from the integration into the surrounding globality which one cannot help but reflect upon. The body, that of the artist-subject, reveals only his desire to become an instrument of perception, more specifically an instrument of vision, of seeing. No other meaning. A piece of space as a moving horizon.
What is the identity of this screen which absorbs space and reflects
it at the same time? Subject is obliterated in the play of this disembodied,
atemporal visuality. With the invasive effect of a vast, infinite environment,
the repoussoir-body is swallowed up in space. This shock to the body
is the same for all territoriality.
SOC/COS, mirror effect, screen effect. A multitude of reflective facets
upon the clothe worn recall other photographic strategies used previously
and revisited here in the Tinglado venue: the image of multiple faces,
fragmented and brought together in a new unity. Here too a de-corporality
may be discerned, an opening up of limits, the frontiers of these face/bodies
which put before us a vast field of colour, but nevertheless unreadable.
Fleeing from faciality means also fleeing from the affirmation of the
being in its subjectivity.
And what if in this way Anton Roca guaranteed the passage from face to landscape? Landscape: the subjective framing of nature in its raw state, always greater than one. Upon the mirror-body, just as on the splintered and interlaced faces, the eye hits the surface and takes pleasure in moving about the unnamed expanse of the being, on its periphery. Thus, the body proposed today by Anton Roca plays towards its own loss. It was a relational limit, and it becomes a transient reality in the expanse of spaces and circulations. And there could be no better screen for this identity, and the body which carries its signs, than the Tinglado, the temporary starting point in the heart of the port of Tarragona, that great gateway to the sea.
December 2005
