Artist: Boa Mistura
Fechas: May 27th 2023 to July 14th 2023

ON THE FRONTIERS OF COLOUR

Ubuntu is one of those precious words capable of embracing more meanings than we can grasp. The word comes from the Zulu and Xhosa languages. The philosophy of Ubuntu: sharing creates a bond that empathically connects all humanity, and individuality is found within collectivity. After a residency in South Africa, Boa Mistura has taken up this concept to create a work that is fragmented into 36 quadrants measuring 30 x 30 centimetres each and framed separately. Together, the sum of these individualities makes up Ubuntu, once the original piece forms the sum of the letters making up the word. When someone acquires one of these fragments for their collection, Boa Mistura undertakes to paint it somewhere in the world, so that each collector, through their private action, becomes the patron of a project in a public space that, in principle, is unknown to them. As in the Ubuntu philosophy, every action has a consequence, with the particularity that the project weaves a sort of spider’s web between artists, locations and collectors, creating a shared work, as each collector can only buy one of the 36 quadrants.

Once again, Boa Mistura opens itself up to exploration, serendipity and discovery; forms of drifting previously shared with the spectator which, in the collective’s latest works such as Ubuntu or Reversus, have been extended to include the complicity of those who wish to collect these works, thus giving them a fundamental importance as part of the work-in-progress that defines each project. In terms of form, the fragment here is a plastic form; perfect, emphatic in its brevity. Each fragment has its own intrinsic meaning; it is a painting in itself that allows the typical ephemerality of Boa Mistura’s work to be prolonged. The work becomes elastic, because the poetry of incompleteness is always limitless. The issue is not an insignificant one, because the fragment would usually lack the notion of time. However in these fragments proffered by Boa Mistura, a kind of temporal disarray allows the transformation to be continuous and enables the collective’s work, always participatory and relational, to remain in transition.

To achieve all of this, Boa Mistura relies on colour and language. Colour, in this case, develops like a labyrinth in the shape of a palimpsest. It is a penetrable colour, capable of showing yet simultaneously concealing all of its parts so that the parts themselves can be transformed. Meanwhile, language, like colour, acquires a tactile quality, and is configured as a drawing, a plastic tool, a structure or an imprint of the idea. Poetry, drawing and colour are combined. After all, colour is like a pre-verbal form of writing, even if it always escapes.

Boa Mistura sees colour from within and has its own particular rainbow. This, despite the fact that colour isn’t something that you can “say”, as Rimbaud knew very well when he described the colour of vowels. The reverberation of planes of colour, which is extraordinary here, has already been the subject of great efforts of theoretical systematisation by artists such as Josef Albers, who taught us that in visual perception we almost never see a colour as it really, physically, is. That’s why a black square isn’t always a black square. In the same way, the locations chosen by Boa Mistura to give form to Ubuntu can evoke very different readings depending on our own personal experiences, life situations, understanding or states of mind, but all of them are decisive for those who inhabit or imagine these landscapes.

I think of Norman Ives, who was mentored by Albers and who designed logos of great plasticity. Ives, who asserted that designers must distort letters to make them unique while retaining details that allow them to be recognised, would argue that no part of a symbol can be removed without destroying the image it creates, since, like a Gestalt, the psychological effect of the total image is greater than the sum of its parts. These assumptions are applicable here if we consider that Ubuntu is, first and foremost, an imaginary map into which we can all enter and coexist within, a sort of sentimental cartography where each person will empathise more with one particular part than with another. These reverberations on the frontiers of colour can be extended not only to Boa Mistura’s commitment to working in peripheral environments, generating rifts in our perception, but also to the way it brings together people who, without knowing each other or the location where they are going to be symbolically linked, become fundamental parts of the work.

Boa Mistura also projects this peripheral sensation in its treatment of typography, almost always fragmented into its anamorphic processes. In this sense, the collective has achieved something peculiar through its projects, by monumentalising the microscopic nature of typography in environments where the monumental nature of architecture has already broken down into precariousness. This is a curious situation if we consider how we are able to distinguish Gothic architecture from Baroque or contemporary architecture, yet when we read a newspaper we can’t tell if the typeface is Roman or Egyptian, or whether it’s been around for ten years or four hundred. Boa Mistura inverts this situation to monumentalise typography and redeem a kind of architecture without shadows; shrunken, of insignificant appearance, fragile and peripheral, yet truly significant for the artists and the people who live there. Everything makes sense in situ, as a way of responding to a sensation, to the context, which has to be sounded out in advance in order to comprehend its idiosyncrasy. This is why each of Boa Mistura’s interventions in public spaces is first and foremost a dialogue; a meta-narrative, a crossover with the dialogue they construct using design and colour. A chromatic and rhythmic superimposition that declines into words that, in turn, can be broken down into small abstract paintings that together form a whole. We are reminded of historical typographical adventures such as the Depero futurista exhibition, Barbara Stauffacher Solomon’s supergraphics for the Sea Ranch tennis club, Fernand Léger’s illustrations for La fin du monde, Rosmarie Tissi’s adverts for printing firm Anton Schöb, or Dadaist collages. It is not their legibility that matters, but what the forms and their fragments communicate from a visual point of view.

Taking advantage of the depth allowed by the transparency and superimposition of colours, Boa Mistura gives a twist to something that masters of design such as Piet Zwart or Paul Rand played with in printing presses, for example the way the dust jacket of The Second Man portrays a man and his shadow without letting us know who is who. Boa Mistura maintains this air of mystery while summoning and embracing harmony, consolidating its compositions in a geometry of ideal proportions, which demand to be circulated, just like architecture itself.

Ubuntu is the story of a multi-sided exchange where our gaze, continually under deconstruction, exists in a rift, open to the spatial experience highlighted by the artists and to the sensorial experience that we are invited to enter. More than ever we are invited to take part in a collective creation, a kind of situationist drift through a moebius strip, since our wandering here always has an aim: even if we don’t know which side of the strip we are on, the aim is to reach Ubuntu. Because as Merleau-Ponty observes, it’s not a question of viewing the work of art itself, but of viewing the world from the work of art.

David Barro