Featured Image: Xavier Robles de Medina’s driehoekshandel 2018
“The past is always present” was originally written for London-based Contemporary Artist Xavier Robles de Medina’s presence at Artissima Art Fair in Torino, Italy (2018).
Art is a metalanguage, and these are but a few of the tales Xavier Robles de Medina has tongued.
The oeuvre of Xavier Robles de Medina is both a mechanism of communication and a transfer of knowledge. A commentary and a conversation. Exchanges made possible by the artist’s dexterity, astute use of historical allusions and humble-yet-sufficient scales which beckon the viewer closer, bringing the laborious intricacies of each work into full view.
Artefacts of handcrafted mastery, the fruit of dedicated periods of intensity. An intensity profoundly felt in the taut ripples of Cult Value, an unsettling piece permeating with sentiments of suffocation. Delve deeper into the potent dark of graphite and discern an asphyxiated figure also encountered in Rajio Taiso.
Rajio Taiso begins, like most of Robles de Medina’s work, as a graphite drawing on paper demonstrative of his prowess and dedication to overt precision. Subsequently each masterful mark of graphite undergoes a multidimensional translation, resulting in a sculpture with the power to transfix a viewer who locks eyes with it. On the wall, the three pieces converse. A whispered dialogue amongst an alluring lineage. The three-part series’ very presence enunciates the artist's valuation of process and progression as important.
Similarly, In the Realm of Translation is another sculpture descendent of the artist’s evolutionary process that begins on paper. On show without its progenitors, the piece’s title is a reference to Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay The Task of the Translator. Within this series, Robles de Medina is both creator and translator. Each iteration is a trans-materialisation of the original. Descendent pieces do not erase or replace the antecedent, for all remain in existence. Instead every iteration illustrates a milestone of progress only achieved because of what proceeded it. The past perfuses the present. Through these observations, the viewer becomes privy to the artist’s evolution of thought.
Aside from the sculptural pieces, there is a familiar yet enigmatic presence in Robles de Medina’s drawings too. Driehoekshandel is a graphite drawing on paper, featuring three figures seemingly engaging in a transaction. Irrespective of its small scale and monochromaticity, the drawing is absorptive and its matter is weighty. The bold title Driehoekshandel, or triangular trade in English, is a historical reference to the cyclical movement of enslaved bodies, raw materials and processed goods between Africa, the Americas and Europe. A dark age in which gluttonous capitalist desires tyrannised humanity. Here, Robles de Medina’s political poeticism is palpable.
Driehoekshandel’s ambiguity sparks an inwardness on viewer, a moment of reflective thinking. The obscured expressions of the three figures, the female figure in particular, awakens viewers to immerse themselves into the depicted scene. Robles de Medina’s reiteration of The Procuress by Dirck van Baburen (1622), as featured in the background of Johannes Vermeer’s Young Woman Seated at a Virginal (1670-72), guides us back to present and to an intuited commentary on the business of contemporary art. An artist-dealer-collector relationship, materialised. The state of art and commerce skilfully depicted with a spritz of dark humour. A personality, with which the artist builds a subliminal rapport with the viewer. The artist is present, and so are we. For we, the viewers, are part of this transaction too— as consumers and voyeurs of consumption.
Xavier Robles de Medina’s burgeoning boldness and persuasive poeticism is unbound by the frames of his works, for it boldly bleeds out onto the walls too. The wallpaper features a depiction of the baculum from a North American mouse. The very existence of the baculum, a bone found in the penises of mammals throughout history, was and still is influenced by socio-cultural systems of being like monogamy. In this way, the baculum is illustrative of how historical value systems and our ethnosphere, creates our current reality. The drawing, made decorative through repetition like that of floral patterning, imbues a conversation on evolution; former times, practices and its influence on the present.
The wallpaper is representative of a centre of gravity, a common thread intrinsically woven into each work. The use of historical images as starting points, a pervading cultural consciousness and a precedence on dexterous craftsmanship. At the hands of Xavier Robles de Medina, the viewer is immersed into a world in which the past is always present.