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from the series Temprano en la mañana (Early in the Morning), 2006, acrylic on canvas mounted on wood, 63 × 55 inches. All images courtesy of the artist and the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection.

Among the phenomena that Walter Benjamin addresses in his study on Baudelaire, the one related to the presence of the chiffonier in The Flowers of Evil seems particularly relevant when trying to understand modern art’s processes. By working with the ruins of merchandise, the chiffonier represents a possible melancholic synthesis of capitalism. Even Baudelaire, by looking for poetry lines amid the detritus of Parisian streets, might have functioned as a chiffonier himself.

Like Baudelaire, 20th-century painters composed assemblages with the discarded objects they gathered. Collage, assemblages, and readymades all respond to the poetic force of artists’ strategic investigation of trash in modern society. An important part of Dulce Gómez’s work is inscribed in this tradition. From very early on in her career, she has been working with the remainders of everyday objects extricated from their habitual contexts. Her painterly surfaces have ranged from the upholstery of old furniture to industrial tarp and plastic coverings, cardboard, and packing material. She also has used everyday objects like ink blotters and needles in unexpected ways that break away from their automatized use and produce allegories of time’s passage and the dynamics of light.

With these materials, Gómez makes assemblages and installations that are powerful syntheses of calculation and chance. In general, her work has been determined by a dialectical relationship between the programmed and the random, the deliberate and the unexpected. This is manifest even in her more traditionally painterly projects, such as her series Early in the Morning.

As a modern chiffonier, Gómez recycles and reorganizes the world upon its refuse. Her assemblages, paintings, and installations are made with a passion for integration that allows her to construct hybrid constellations, rhythmical series, and consistent chromatic bodies.

 

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Translated by Clinton Krute.

 

from the series Temprano en la mañana (Early in the Morning), 2006, acrylic on canvas mounted on wood, 63 × 55 inches.

Rafael Castillo Zapata Looking at your first works up to the present, a couple of running threads become apparent. One relates to the idea of systems, of series, of continuity. Another has to do with the random, the unpredictable, the forms found in the process of exploring an imaginary world. How are these two threads part of your process?

Dulce Gómez I can visualize those threads more concretely now, because I had the opportunity to work in a different place than my normal work space in Caracas this past year during my residency at the Bronx Museum. I also participated in the Artist in the Marketplace program there, and was able to interact with other artists, curators, critics, and museum staff. In the Bronx, I saw clearly that I always start with that selfsame logic, where encountering materials at random is an integral part of the work. The more calculated part of the process—which is more rigorous because I’m more conscious of it—reveals itself in the finished piece.

RCZ Do those threads become manifest simultaneously the entire time or are there moments of creative experience in which one weighs more than the other?

DG They are always interacting. My work has a significant mood-related charge. I mean by this that even though I aspire to arrive at an image I have in mind when beginning a work, I also have to deal with a mood—one that I sometimes struggle with a little so that it doesn’t compete with or take away from the image. No doubt there are pieces among the number of mediums that I work with—painting, assemblage, and installation—in which the resolution of this struggle is fast. There are other pieces that take more time to execute and achieve via the dynamic between chance and system filtered through my feelings and emotions.

RCZ In this dialectic or game between project, calculation, and chance, I imagine that the moment of finding is fundamental for you. That is to say, the confluence between what you imagine the piece could be and the actual process of making it carries with it the possibility of discovery.

DG Precisely. I always begin with a proposition or a question, a process influenced by the constant psychoanalytic work I’ve been doing for the last 16 years, and which now makes up a part of my work. You might say that my creative practice is processed through analysis. This wasn’t a conscious decision; the systematic psychoanalysis gave me a structure—the strong and weak parts of my character are both connected with my work. I make relationships between materials and concepts, as well as associations with ideas and shapes the way they should be made, and I can do it quickly.

So even though I have a rational side that knows exactly what I’m looking for, I try to allow chance and experimentation to yield the unexpected. In the end, however, I have to choose and discriminate so that only the parts that interest me remain.

RCZ I’ve heard you talk about crucial moments in your development as an artist. Could you point out some of them by talking about specific pieces and explaining how they mark a point of inflection on your trajectory?

DG At the beginning of the ’90s I did a trilogy that began with a piece from ’94 entitled Dibujo en Rojo (Drawing in Red). It was made of two panels of raw wood 5 by 6.5 feet long, on which I arranged a row of droppers filled with red ink. The panels had been lying on the floor and when they were finally installed on the wall of the Museo Alejandro Otero in Caracas, the ink dripped out and down the boards. That piece has been shown three or four times, if I remember correctly, and every time all the droppers except those blocked up with solidified ink are refilled. Drawing in Red has a process that is still alive.

Autorretrato Anónimo (Anonymous Self-Portrait), from ’95, is a pattern cutter. On the wall of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo I arranged the resulting series of linked paper chains, like chains of children’s paper dolls. The museum’s visitors could take a piece of the chain and put it into a paper shredder. During the three months the exhibit was up, visitors contributed to the installation by adding to the mound of shredded paper. A new, shapeless form was created, a process that turned the piece into a participatory event of collective creation. It has been exhibited on three different occasions and also contains a device that keeps its process alive. It’s as if it becomes new again each time.

The third piece is called Inmersión (Immersion), and is a series of 10 Cibachrome prints that record the immersion of a table, made to scale, in a fish tank into which I had poured blue ink. The idea was to record the process of the ink slowly coloring the entirety of the fish tank’s interior—including the water and the table.

So, Immersion, Drawing in Red, and Anonymous Self-Portrait are three pieces that show my awareness of process, the live development of the ongoing piece, more obviously. After that I made pieces that were more fixed, like Nivel I (Level I): there are lines on the canvas, and above them there’s a level, like the ones that builders and architects use to make sure that everything is perfectly level. This piece isn’t mobile in time, but it does allude to the process of its own hanging by making visible the tool with which one verifies whether or not it has been hung properly.

RCZ Many of these pieces are arranged around a mechanical element outside of traditional mediums: droppers, a paper shredder, a fish tank, and a level. You could say this is related to the thread of systemization, control, and calculation, and to your interest in devices of mechanical articulation, since the works are not merely gestural.

DG Yes. Ten years ago I was less conscious of the moment in which a piece was open to those noncontrolled situations, though I’ve always been interested in the unexpected that might be as surprising for the spectator as it is for me. Though I’m still on that same search for a certain control over my materials and the elements with which I create, I have more distance today, and this allows me to make more pieces that begin spontaneously. In my latest work, calculation isn’t as present, I allow spontaneity to dictate the creative process. The last piece I did, Pins, is a continuation of that trilogy from the ’90s. It is based on the perforation of the head of a pin; I’m nailing the shadow, you could say. The shadow depends on the light, and the light is placed at a certain distance from the piece. First I nail a map pin into the surface. Then I nail the next map pin into the head of the shadow thrown by the first. Eventually I end up with a drawing, a final image. The piece is sustained by the play between the material quality of the physical map pin and the immateriality of its shadow.

RCZ And yet, in Pins, the idea of the series is dominant because the composed sequence is a chain where each trace is derived from the previous element. It constructs a kind of visual melody in which, yes, quite a lot of chance is involved, but it also involves a lot of control, even a geometric control of the scene you’re representing. I think those two approaches are unavoidable in your work. Perhaps the emphasis on the random nature of the gesture is more palpable in the slightly more expressionistic pieces, where the control isn’t so evident. But you also have a tendency to organize the final object rationally. It is a dialectic that produces important effects in your work—you made reference to the importance of your analysis, the exploration of the unconscious through the mediation of language. In your work there might also be an attempt to explore that “other” which exists in experience but doesn’t reveal itself at first glance. It seems to me that the practice of reading between the lines might have an effect on how you conceive of some works. One could say that it produces effects at the level of representation in your painting. I’m thinking about some of your works where you play a game with the visibility of the image and the superimposing of surfaces, where you attempt to invent transparency through devices like plastic, for example. Those visual games indicate another thread running through your work: the construction of visibility through the use of illusion or simulacrum.

 

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