Gustavo Díaz: Wild Wind, Subtle Breeze

Gustavo Díaz: In and Out of the Studio

Gustavo Díaz’s drawing table occupies about a third of the small studio in New York City where he has taken up residence for the last two years. In this diminutive space, he has created, among other works, monumental rolled drawings on exquisitely delicate mulberry paper. These unfold, literally, a sequence of “situations”—as Díaz calls his infinitely variable clusters of graphite marks—which engage in silent dialogue with one another. Some situations are coiled and dense; others are diffuse and airy. Measuring almost thirty-three feet in length, these drawings are events; they take time to apprehend, but they also reveal the artist’s highwire performance in creating them. The mulberry paper is easily torn; no mark can be erased or applied too roughly without ruining the work.

Díaz’s smaller drawings on heavy cotton paper are less fragile, but they convey a similar sense of drama. While creating these laborious works, Diaz is inspired by nothing less than the complexity of the universe itself. He draws on the mathematical concept of “fuzzy logic,” developed in the 1960s by Lotfi A. Zadeh. Fuzzy logic rejects the binary of ones and zeros, yes and no, true and false, positing instead a sprawling field of variables that live between certainties. This ambiguity is the stuff of life, and the drawings are Díaz’s thoughts made manifest; they are both process and product. Díaz borrows from the South African artist William Kentridge the analogy of paper-as-membrane. A membrane separates, but it is also a bridge—in this case, between the artist’s thoughts and the world out there. This is an old concept; in the Renaissance, disegno (design or drawing) was pitted against colore (color) and was prized for its unique capacity to express the artist’s intellect.

Díaz’s studio offers further clues to his thought process. Its surfaces are covered with intricate tableaux consisting of objects from nature—feathers, shells, driftwood, bird nests, fungi—and Díaz’s sometimes indistinguishable counterparts in cut and otherwise manipulated paper. Neat displays of books attest to Díaz’s far-ranging curiosity: artist monographs jostle picturesquely with fiction by fellow Argentine Jorge Luis Borges and volumes on chaos theory and fuzzy sets, ornithology and ecology. CDs add another layer; Diaz studies music and listens to it while he works. Glenn Gould’s profound lifelong engagement with Bach’s Goldberg Variations is a source of special fascination. Like Gould, Diaz is devoted to the world and the work of the studio. Using the metaphor of a uterus, Diaz likens the studio to a biological system imbued with the power of renewal and rebirth.