Cibrián is thrilled to present Cada día y cada día más, the second solo exhibition by José Ramón Amondarain at the gallery.
It is astonishing the faculty we human beings have to imagine, in a simple stone, the shape of an arrowhead. The ability to construct an image in the mind and transfer it with our hands to the external world, together with language, has been our great comparative advantage. Homo sapiens—the humanity that brought us to this point—was born of a prehensile activity: it is the subject that grasps. Heirs of the primates, we separate, hold, control, build, calculate, measure, compare, and organize. We are a species with a nervous system of enormous potential that chose, as its path of development, the technical direction: the manipulation and construction of forms.
This profound interconnection between the hands and the brain is evident in Penfield’s homunculus, where the different parts of the body are represented according to the amount of neural resources they require. In this representation, the face and especially the hands stand out in a disproportionate way. The brain not only keeps a precise record of the position of our hands, but also possesses an extraordinary awareness of the body’s complete posture, in every moment and context.
In the mid-1960s, Bruce Nauman documented on video a series of actions in which he explored different and successive bodily positions. In his work, “postures” become a tool for dismantling reality through the sense of proprioception, which allows us to know the position, movement, and action of our body in space without needing to rely on sight. In Wall Floor Positions, the artist sets up a series of bodily arrangements that articulate his body in direct relation to the architectural surfaces of the studio—walls and floor—adopting deliberately uncomfortable or strained positions that reveal the operative and process-based nature of the action.
Similarly, in climbing gyms, the practice of climbing involves the systematic rehearsal of specific body patterns. Static positions, or locks, force the climber to execute a movement and hold it for a few seconds before continuing. This pause generates a kind of bullet time: a suspended moment in which the body concentrates the past, present, and future of the gesture, in a way similar to what Degas achieved when he manages to show, in a single movement, what has just happened, what is happening, and what will happen immediately afterward.
This expanded perception of the moment finds an echo in the stance most widely accepted by science regarding the so-called splitting of time, according to which physical time does not flow on its own, but the brain generates the sensation of flow as a functional mechanism. The body and brain process information and anticipate outcomes before conscious thought intervenes. Thus, thanks to the mechanisms of the predictive brain—which combine memory, simulation of possible futures, emotion, and learning—phenomena such as premonitions, intuitions, inspirations, hunches, illuminations, or sudden moments of lucidity can be explained. These revelations activate in artists the desire to create: calculations and plans that will inevitably be betrayed, but are necessary to respond to the dynamics of desire. According to the climber’s Technique, a method that facilitates planning when one does not know where to start, it proposes a way to organize anticipatory information. This technique allows for defining a final goal and the intermediate steps necessary to achieve it. Like mountain guides, who first visualize the summit and then trace the path downward, this method starts from the final objective and identifies, step by step and in reverse order, the prior states until reaching the starting point.
However, in the realm of art, this teleological model comes into crisis. The goal to be reached transforms into a kind of MacGuffin: a device that keeps the process open and produces a constant sense of insufficiency and incompletion. It is a productive condition that enables becoming, displacements, and reconfigurations of meaning. A set of signs, which goes in search of a desire that, even if only for a moment, manages to filter into the folds of space, into its hidden and fleshy interstices, becomes a vehicle for expression.
Desire no longer remains on the surface, as in the Baroque, but manifests in the thickness and movement of images. In fact, we allow ourselves to be explored by an infinity of dimensional spaces and by a world of multiple relationships. We live through a decentralized, tentacular mode of thought, with an inexhaustible number of connections, and witness astonishing discoveries—such as certain mysteries of nature revealed by the scientific community.
An example of this is Physarum polycephalum, whose name literally means “many-headed mold,” nicknamed the blob in reference to the movie The Blob. It is a single-celled organism that has no mouth, stomach, or eyes, yet it is capable of detecting and digesting food. It also has no arms or legs; nevertheless, it can move and double its size within twenty-four hours. Researchers have concluded that, despite lacking a central nervous system or a brain, the blob can learn from experience, transmit knowledge, and modify its behavior accordingly. It is capable of organizing itself, responding to its environment, and finding solutions that do not follow human logic.
A Japanese study conducted in 2010 demonstrated how Physarum polycephalum was able to trace a network comparable to the railway system of Greater Tokyo. For the experiment, a translucent plate reproducing the geographical features of Tokyo and its surroundings through variations in light intensity was used, on which food sources—oats—were placed in the locations corresponding to the main urban centers. The result was that the mold designed a network of tubes remarkably similar to the city’s railway system, which had been developed over several years of human planning. This experiment reveals that life does not thrive in isolation, but through connection.
The blob moves forward like life itself
exploring blindly
failing
retreating
trying again
It learns not out of ambition
but through contact
Memory is not in a center
it is in the journey
The blob whispers to us that perhaps intelligence
does not lie in control
but in adaptation
that wisdom is not moving fast
but in finding a sufficient path
While power demands productive lives
the blob practices a sufficient life
The blob is a figure of anonymous becoming
an impersonal life
pre-individual
Life does not need to be governed
to be intelligent
It does not need consciousness
to be intelligent
When I think of the mold Physarum polycephalum, my mind keeps returning to Jackson Pollock’s drippings. There is something in that flow—in the letting-go of the body of the artist—that turns the body itself into an instrument for generating patterns. In the absence of a center or hierarchy, the dripping unfolds a visual field without a focal point: a continuous network that spreads evenly across the surface. In 1994, the scientist Richard Taylor conducted a study showing that Pollock had created fractal networks in his paintings roughly twenty-five years before Benoît Mandelbrot published The Fractal Geometry of Nature in 1977. Taylor also observed that the fractal dimension of Pollock’s works progressively increased over a decade, as the artist refined his dripping technique. Both the blob fungus and Pollock’s dripping act as rhizomes, as open systems, generating trajectories, multiplicities, and varying intensities of relation that can be understood as processes in action.
We could think of painting as an intelligent material, devoid of consciousness, yet capable of experiencing the world without the need for self-reflection. Painting does not think like a subject, but it insists, remembers, and responds. An active material, endowed with history, agency, and its own capacity for thought, it allows us to imagine that forms do not originate solely in the present, but emerge from fields of memory that traverse time and space. In this way, painting would survive thanks to a type of intelligence inherent to the material, to its capacities, and painters could be seen as a kind of tool, often caught in a hamster wheel, due to sustained attention, characteristic of a consciousness immersed in inertia.
Painting operates as a device for destabilizing prior certainties, not so much through what it produces as through what persists within it. Its power does not lie in the final result, but in the residue that survives the intention, where the pictorial material does not submit to individual logic, but responds to a transpersonal will. This will does not express itself through the painter, but is actualized in them, understood as a site of inscription and action.
In this sense, the painter is not defined by the act of painting itself, but by the framework of thought that sustains their practice. Recognizing that thought is neither autonomous nor original, but one possibility among others, entails assuming responsibility; and any desire for connection—with the material, with tradition, or with others—necessarily carries responsibility.
The exhibition Cada día y cada día más unfolds like a choreography in which the audience can move between different focal distances. As we observe in Titian, our vision often relies on peripheral retina, capturing imprecision, because we cannot represent the world in its entirety. Peripheral vision does not seek sharpness, but a broad and diffuse perception, where the visible is sustained in indeterminacy. As we approach the work, almost brushing the surface of the canvas, our gaze concentrates and activates the fovea, that small area of the retina where visual definition reaches its maximum. This focalization creates fragments of attention, small points that allow us to explore the foreground, while simultaneously transporting us to the dimension of aerial views or topographic surveys, offering, without a doubt, a high-definition experience of reality itself.
José Ramón Amondarain.