Gustavo Díaz

Constructing Uncertainty:

Traversing the art of Gustavo Diaz

Addressing both the intimate and the infinite, Gustavo Diaz’s works involve thinking on and through paper, demonstrating a rigorous and multifaceted engagement with his primary medium. Seemingly miraculous in their microscopic scale and rich detail, the artist’s works involve hundreds of hours of production. He uses computers and laser-cutting machines, yet his interactions with these technologies are more analogue in approach than digital. While the patterns visible in these works appear computer generated, they are all meticulously drawn “by hand” (using a computer’s mouse). The artist specifically defies the seduction of multiplicity and algorithmically generated forms that computer programs currently promote, preferring a more meditative and manually exhaustive process. With the laser cutting machines, their ability to cut paper to a minuscule degree is of particular interest in producing a scale that forces the viewer’s close reception of them. It is additionally the fact that the machines are burning the paper to create lines and shapes that attracts the artist, as it represents a contemporary manifestation of the ancient use of fire as a tool for mark-making. 

The artist’s particular lived experience informs these artworks. At the age of twenty-seven, after studying engineering, fine arts and musical composition, Diaz moved to Cariló, several hours from Buenos Aires. At the time this area was extremely isolated and the artist moved there to study in solitude, pursuing diverse investigations related to philosophy, natural science, physics, literature, sound and drawing. He built by hand his own house and stayed living in this area for the next twenty years before relocating to Houston. The landscape of Cariló is both austere and full of texture and detail, as tall pine trees give way to wide sand dunes and unobstructed views of surf and the sea’s horizon. One senses that this context has deeply influenced the artist’s practice, the extended experience of physical isolation, combined with deep contemplation and intellectual activation, occurring in dialogue with the specific visual qualities of the landscape in which these investigations took place. It helps create an understanding of this work’s unique ability to feel so close and so far at the same time, with the seemingly endless and expanding repetition of its textured, minute details quickly moving one’s mind toward more vast, expansive fields of contemplation.

Nests, bark, coral, mushrooms, stones; the linear patterns of these natural elements are references in many of the artist’s works and help ground our reception of them in the tangible. Yet it would be an oversimplification to tie these works solely to landscape and the natural world. Rather, here one might come to understand natural forms as far less simple in organization than one normally accepts. In discussing his works, Diaz at times mentions nature, but more often speaks of generative systems and their disruption, of theories of chaos interconnecting with those of catastrophe, of disjunctive logics placed in dialogue. These ideas are often formally translated through conflicting stylistic patterning visible within an individual work. Looking intently, the viewer can often see fluid, irregular and natural looking configurations intersected by geometric forms that appear more traditionally architectonic and mathematical. 

In his process of articulating a particular artistic investigation, Diaz often turns to the physical presentation of layered and overlapping books, which he refers to as non-linear “semantic constellations.” While dense and initially difficult to grasp, these presentations are useful tools in deciphering the divergent roots of the artist’s rhizomatic thought processes. Related to the works in the current exhibition, one sees, for example, several works by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges placed under those of the North American composer John Cage, near a book by the mathematician and analytical philosopher Kurt Gödel. Several publications on the topic of “Fuzzy Logic” lie near “Granular Patterns,” adjacent to “Particle Physics” and “An Introduction to String Theory and D-brane Dynamics.” These are juxtaposed with “Branches,” by the British science writer Philip Ball and “In Praise of Shadows,” by the Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki. With Diaz’s three-dimensional diagrams, an initial layer of books is often followed by additional layers, as his thinking evolves with a given project. 

With the title of his current exhibition, Incompletitud: La poetica de lo intangible

Diaz alludes to the “incompleteness theorem” by Kurt Gödel, originally published in 1931, in which the mathematician articulates the idea that for any law or logic to be “complete” it must contain within it its own contradiction. His thinking, based in science but more philosophical or even existential in character, implies that we are all in fact incomplete and only within our own contradictions might we approach a sense of wholeness. Diaz combines this reference with those of the “intangible,” which addresses his consistent experimentation with the limits of materiality, often pushing the structure of paper close to the point of disintegration.