Txomin Badiola Alm: To Experiment
MARIANO NAVARRO *
Txomin Badiola (Bilbao, 1957) has spent more than 25 years in the public scene, and has produced an extremely extensive cycle which, rather than closing, situates a vital and aesthetic, personal and collective project at the very heart of contemporary international sculpture practices. And he has done so, precisely, by subverting the specific conditions, impositions and circumstances which would have limited and restricted his possible sphere of action. It is possible, therefore, to conduct an analysis of his work, of its results and effects. Even if restricted to a brief essay, I hope to point out some approaches and interpretations to his work which seem open and relevant. Surprisingly, the images I remember from some of Txomin Badiola’s early works, from the early 1980s, include wooden constructions, entitled Bastardos, and untitled drawings of human heads drawn through the positions of an almost identical gesture, repeated from top to bottom and from bottom to top of the paper. His conception of human existence is presented, internally and externally, with a solid sense of distrust of the contemporary fruits of the genealogy of modernity. The artist explained this further in an interview: “in 1983, after my […] first drawings”, he told Txema Esparta, “what I tried to do was to leave behind the strictly minimalist work, or that sculpture which was close to minimalism”1. Like other artists from the same background and generation, he found the solution in the recovery, study, analysis, comprehension, and rejection of one of the legendary and simultaneously unknown figures in Basque art, Jorge de Oteiza (1908-2003), who –like Angel Bados, Juan Luis Moraza, Maria Luisa Fernandez (who at that time belonged to CVA, the Cooperative of Artistic Vigilance), Jose Ramon Morquillas (on a different theoretical range) and Pello Irazu (who was younger, the disciple of the others)– the work was essentially and mostly interested in the experimental, investigative and integral idea of Oteiza’s aesthetic ideology. Each would pursue this task on the basis of their prior positions, Bados from a Beuysian approach, Moraza and Fernandez from linguistic conceptualisation, Morquillas more adoptively, and Irazu as the germ for subsequent developments. “We were not so much interested in what Oteiza was pursuing,
(a search of the Basque essential) as in the conceptual methods and tools used, which refers to a much wider debate, which was linked to the remains of existentialism, but above all to the structuralist debate. (…) One of the issues which they were most aware of had to do with the limits of formalisation”2. This last issue will be further cited in these notes. Badiola curated and catalogued the first large exhibition on Oteiza to take place in our country, at the space of the Fundacion La Caixa, in 1988. In his long and definitive catalogue text, he highlighted the foundations of the Oteizan project, which, in my opinion, matched his own attitude. “The artwork, when approached from an ontological point of view, as a specific way of being able to resist death”. An impossible resistance for abstract concepts and archetypes, which need or demand living beings in order to be included in life. “This is where, according to the ideas of Oteiza, the artwork resists and becomes that promise of eternity”3, says Badiola. It was on this basis that the daring young sculptor deduced the profound interrelation between event, act and signs as elements which vitalise forms and convey duration. “From a narrative point of view”–which, as we will see, enjoys its own space in the work of Badiola–, “the artwork is an organism produced by a series of space-time discontinuums, which hint at the moment where they exist structurally. These different expressive moments are susceptible to being developed in experimental series, in an attempt to control expression”. This Oteizan assertion is worth mentioning, not just because of the serial developments, which do in fact characterise his work and that of Badiola, but also because of the attempts to control expression, given that, as he himself states, “Yes, of course in the words of Oteiza, the main product of the artist is the artist himself. It is a matter of constructing oneself, and the experimental purpose are the tests to which one submits in order to become another”. “Modern art, both painting and sculpture, in these experimental aspects, is an intricate journey of the Euclidean elements (sphere, cone, cylinder), in their many incarnations, from configurations on the basis of flat elements to the establishment of the polyhedron in masses. (…) ARTECONTEXTO · 45