Warp and hatch
Et je me crée d’un trait de plume
Maître du Monde,
Homme illimité
Pierre-Albert Birot- Les amusements naturels
Painting is often compared to writing. The solitude of the creative act, the necessary and inevi- table introspection, rewriting (and its equivalent, repainting), and often, the need for cohesion in the final object, make the two disciplines pairs of distracted similarity. Marguerite Duras said that “The solitude of writing is a solitude without which writing could not be produced, or would crumble, drained bloodless by the search for something else to write”1. That loneliness is also that of the painter, who in his studio becomes a demiurge forced to find the best way to weave the threads of his cosmos.
Diego Pujal (Buenos Aires, 1971) is usually classified as a painter; However, we quickly notice that the category falls short, since Pujal, like everyone who delves into their practice, tends to transgress its borders. In fact, on this occasion, not only have the theoretical limits of painting been expanded, but the artistic object itself - in other words, the painting - has also gone further. In recent years, Pujal has explored the limits of the purification of his visual language: perfectly defined and flat color spots, often superimposed on each other and always floating in a vacuum. These layers of organic shapes are intertwined in the eyes of the observer creating spaces of recollection and meditation, in the same way that a fabric would: creating physical (and meta- physical) coherence and at the same time allowing folds and pleats.
The physical coherence of Diego Pujal’s pieces has taken a new dimension in his latest series of works, since he has literally added a third to the two-dimensionality of the painting. The black shapes leave the plain of the painting to gain space for the observer, as we clearly see in "urdimbre 2" and "urdimbre 3", and thus, cause a real change in their sensitive environment. In the step towards the three-dimensionality that the artist’s work has taken, we find, already in the series title, urdimbre, a veiled reference to the underlying three-dimensionality of the pictorial surface: the parallel threads that cross the weft in the loom to be definitively united on the canvas. At the same time, it is the warp itself - in this case burlap - that is made explicit under the floating black of the new pieces.
Ultimately, "urdimbre" at Galería Zielinsky reveals nothing but the reaffirmation of the refine- ment of a pictorial language. As in the verses of Birot, Diego Pujal shows us Maître du Monde: at the stroke of a pen (in this case, a brush and a 3D printer) a custom cosmos is created, designed so that we inhabit it among all and in which he will surely continue to develop his visual lexicon.
Jordi Garrido
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1DURAS, M. Escribir (2ª Ed.). Barcelona: Tusquets, 2009.