• Exhibition
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In Search of the Third Dimension

Javier Molins *

"We wish a picture to come out of its frame and a sculpture out of its crystal hood"

Secondo manifesto dello Spazialismo, 1949.

The windows of the gallery are closed and darkness has taken over a room from the ceiling of which hang papier-mâché forms illuminated by a black light. On Saturday 5 th February 1949, at Galleria del Naviglio in Milan, Fontana shows his "Spatial atmosphere with spatial forms and black lighting". The viewers hesitate in the dark attracted by those suspended forms in the void which, totally informal, negate their belonging either to the painting or to the sculpture categories, thus creating an unknown one, where painting and sculpture are associated precisely to a new, unique dimension".

This is how Fontana opened the way to the separation of limits between painting and sculpture, which is something present in all his work, at first in his holes done with an awl (buchi), and then his cuts performed on the canvas (tagli). In the words of the artist himself: ‘a cut, actually the hole, the first holes were not destroying the picture, the informal gesture I have been always accused of, without me ever saying anything whatsoever; they were just a dimension beyond the picture, the freedom of conceiving art through any means, through any form1".

Sculpture had already abandoned its pedestal thanks to Auguste Rodin and his bourgeois-looking characters from Calais situated at ground level, thus braking with the idea of sculpture as a monument. Gauguin incorporated painting to sculpture after his fleeing to the Southern Seas, and he awaked a total fascination among the European artists for the African primitive art and its little wooden carvings. Picasso applied the cubist principles to a three-dimensional object in his Feminine Head (1909). Brancusi revolutionized sculpture with his geometrical forms of polished surfaces and he was the precursor of the land art with his intervention performed in 1938 in the Heroes Avenue of the Romanian city of Tirgu-Jiu, consisting of the Silence Table, the Kiss Door and the Endless Column. Giacometti subverted the Renaissance principle of chiselling a piece of marble until reaching the figure shut in its inner in order to create a sculpture by means of adding materials to a minimal structure. Julio Gonzalez introduced the iron forge in sculpture. Calder hung his works to the ceiling and provided them with motion. In short, sculpture experimented a whole transformation along the 20th century, but perhaps Fontana's is the work breaking most clearly those limits between painting and sculpture.

And an heir of the oeuvre by the Italian artist is David Rodriguez Caballero's (Pamplona, 1970) most recent work. They are pieces in search of that third dimension, not resigning themselves to hang on the wall as pictures do. Instead they attempt to break the two dimension limits to occupy space.

The work by David Rodriguez Caballero is the fruit of a long and meditated evolution. Marta Arroyo, curator at IVAM's, has classified his pieces into five different working lines: plexis, works in aluminium, origami works, vinyls and enamels2. The works we are concerned with here would be the result of an outstanding evolution of his works in aluminium. In fact, Marta Arroyo pointed out in 2006 the ‘remarkable sculptural connotation' contained in those works in aluminium and plexis. About four years before, in a text dated in 2000, the critic Oscar Alonso Molina wrote: " An inevitable doubt arises as to whether we stand before constructions rather than before paintings", and he even talks about "sculptures of a minimal dimension3".

David Rodriguez started with his pieces in aluminium in 1999 during a long stay in New York, his works being included under a concept he himself calls "painting without paint", a constant all along his oeuvre. A year before he had started working on plexis, their support being plexiglass, which is a less hard material than aluminium. On such surface Rodriguez applies white paint with a sponge, thus turning it into a gestural painting. With his arm the artist transforms the surface until he achieves that, at a distance, the surface looks monochrome, but in close proximity the spectator appreciates a series of textures. Something the author defines as the "Macro-Micro" effect.

However, when working with aluminium, the technique goes totally the other way round, in spite of aiming at a similar result. David Rodriguez sands down the aluminium surface in an erosional act that produces a whole series of shadows that keep changing as the viewer keeps looking around into the picture. "When do you stop sanding down an aluminium?" asked the Chairman of Marlborough Gallery, Pierre Levai on his first visit to the artist's studio. The question is not a trivial one and the answer is not easy either, because it is the key to the whole work of every artist. As the Art Historian Ernest Gombrich, pointed out, "what worries an artist when planning a picture, when taking notes or hesitating on when a work is finished, is something much more difficult to express with words. The artist perhaps would say that what worries him is ‘if he got it right'.

Prior to reaching that ‘got-it-right' stage, Rodriguez has made a real size ‘scale model' with rag paper to compose the work on the wall enabling him to make a first approach to the final result, which in most cases coincides with his initial sketch. There he has already conceived those little colour stains, always quadrate or rectangular forms, that go together with his works in aluminium, either stuck on each of them along the perimeter of the aluminium without piercing it, or else on the surface itself by means of some stains normally of bigger size.

However, the evolution of the artist's works in aluminium until he reaches these new works challenging the limits between painting and sculpture could not be understood without the arrival of origami to David Rodriguez's work. Origami is the art of folding paper and its origin is Japan. In fact, the word comes from two Japanese words, ‘oru' (fold) and ‘kami' (paper). Anyhow, folds are elements appearing all along History of Art, from the Fidias relieves to Issey Mayake's cloths, through Zurbarán's monks habits so admired by David Rodriguez.

If his works in aluminium started in New York, the origami ones were originated in Valencia in 2003, in the very kites the artist contemplates in Playa Malvarrosa's, fascinated by their lightness, From the cold, hard and heavy support of aluminium, he then changes to a much lighter material, the 360-grammme vegetable paper he can fold as many times as necessary (until the moment he thinks he ‘got it right') to go beyond the limits of bi-dimensionality. Moreover, the paper being translucent, David can even make use of the light (the way Piero della Francesca did for the first time in his frescoes at San Francesco's church in Arezzo) to provide these works with depth and therefore achieve that third dimension. A transparency we can also find in contemporary artists such as Mark Tobey and Julius Bissier and in architects like the Japanese Kasuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa.

That third dimension is the one Eduardo Chillida reached in due time with his ‘gravitations'. His son Luis tells us that his father used to make collages but he did not like glue, because he thought it was a dirty material and it took over some of the existing space between two pieces of paper. One day he arrived all exited home and told them that he had made e drawing without using any ink, pencil or glue. It was totally white, but still a drawing. ‘'It came to his mind to take a few pieces of paper, cut them out, sew them on top and hang them. Consequently, each piece of paper had become one and where previously there was glue, now there was space and they had come to have a third dimension, the dimension of the sculptor4".

Along these same lines, the diversity and profusion of the possible folds in David Rodriguez's origami works makes an endless number of works full of whites and greys to which the author adds little colour notes, as he does in his works in aluminium, through a number of adhesive vinyl pieces. Here again the idea of "painting without paint".

Together with the origami works the triangular figure also appears for the first time. If in the plexis and works in aluminium we had only seen vertical rectangles or squares, in the origami works the triangle is the predominant form. In fact it is the form always adopted by the coloured vinyls.

This is another main characteristic of these last pieces on show in this exhibition. The aluminium loses its rigidity, material and formal and, together with the folds, the triangle appears. The triangular forms take over the space, in the major section of the sanded work in aluminium, as well as in the colour notes.

Moreover, when folding the aluminium sheets, the play between lights and shadows is considerably multiplied, this work presenting therefore endless changing nuances and textures according to the lighting at every moment. Therefore, we could think that these works are the result of a simple addition: aluminium + origami.

Another feature in these new works is their individuality. The pieces in aluminium do work, in most cases, through compositions of different works, as photograms that, once together, conform a film series. However, these new works tend to individuality, they no longer work as a series, but as unique, isolated pieces. Again the author looks back to the traditional value of the unique piece.

That is just the opposite to what happens in his enamels' working line. This line emerges from his work in his studio with new materials such as acetates, on top of which he draws a grid where he applies enamels coming from nail lacquer. After these first sketches, the enamels put on volume and stick to the ceramic. Again, a handmade work becomes apparent in pieces by David, who started working in ceramic workshops (a very present tradition all along History of Art), and he achieves some pieces that, in turn, are also related to the ones in aluminium, because sanded-down aluminium is after all a shiny piece that could almost be a mirror.

This bringing together of different material is clearly visible in his ceramic gardens. David Rodriguez showed for the first time these pieces in enamel and mirrors at the Ise Cultural Foundation, New York, and then at Centro Cultural Espanol, Miami, as part of an exhibition called "Bonds". On a wall of this Centre there was an installation consisting of circumferences of different diameters and colours, done in ceramic, "one of the main symbols in western culture", as a chronicle on The Miami Herald 5 stated at that time.

It is a very similar technique to the one used in the piece he was entrusted with by Instituto Nacional de Estadistica (INE) for their headquarters at Paseo Castellana, Madrid. We can see there a composition which is a sort of ceramic garden spreading over the walls in the building's lobby where those circles of sanded surfaces are also present, some coloured and some with a mirror. These are works where meet the tradition of origami, the experimentation with new materials and the evolution caused by erosion in aluminium surfaces.

The variety in the use of materials would approach him to the works by artists like Robert Ryman, someone David Rodriguez has always admired. Ryman himself says that "a painting starts at its materials and these days a painter has many more materials at his disposal than before. He has to take decisions on how to employ them and what combination of materials to use depending on the results he wants to achieve6".

In the case of David Rodríguez, as we've had the occasion to realize, the use of one material has brought to another one, but perhaps this is more evident in his works in vinyl, widely present in this show at Galeria Moises Albeniz. A working line arising from the scraps of the material the artist uses for his origami pieces. Those coloured straps left spread on the floor of his studio after he has been working at his origami pieces, which gave him the idea of a new path to go into in depth.

David puts these straps on top of a rectangular surface of transparent acetate, thus achieving a new kind of work, enabling him to go further with his ‘painting without paint'. These works, together with the origami ones, do not respond to a previous design. On the contrary, the author keeps on improvising as he goes along until he thinks he has hit the nail on the head, until the work is finished and presents such harmony that, in his eyes, it does not need anything else but to be hang on a wall, and to achieve this purpose he uses those cube-shaped aluminium plugs that separate a work from the wall and provide it with the so longed for sculptural effect, similar to the one in his plexis and his works in aluminium. They are blocs that now, in these new works, are no longer necessary, or at least the are not visible, because the work emanates from the wall itself, it is no longer pushed forward to be exhibited. It is rather an extension of that very wall. A form that, in spite of being made of a hard and resistant material like aluminium, seems to be provided with great lightness and agility and ready to conquer the space, as one day did the works by Lucio Fontana.

David Rodriguez said in an interview with Professor Kosme de Barañano on the esplanade in front of Guggenheim Museum Bilbao that "my gaze has always been a pictorial one, I work on materials perhaps closer to sculpture, but always with the gaze of a painter". I think that there is no sense of relief in my work; maybe what is really there is a closeness to a three-dimensional work, but as I say, always from a pictorial point of view, by means of the treatment itself and also the way the material is made, the intervention at an epidermic level7". However, these new works by David Rodriguez have perhaps gone beyond such pictorial gaze and a sculptural one is commencing to prevail, a gaze that still has a lot of exploring and running to do. Time will tell.