Cindy Rucker Gallery is pleased to present the second solo exhibition by Javier Arce (b. 1973, Cantabria, Spain), About how a Grape may float on the Ocean. The show contains two bodies of work that are differently crafted yet closely related. One is a series of assemblages of traditional North African textiles and photographs based on images obtained in Tangiers by Antonio Cavilla, a photographer of Italian origin who settled in that city in the late 19th century. These works are titled with the phrase by 15th-century Arab philosopher and scientist Ibn Khaldun, which also serves as the title for the exhibition. The second is a series of collages that begins with the same repertoire of Orientalist images, for which the artist has chosen a title that reflects Spanish philosopher Santiago Alba Rico's idea: What cannot be looked at becomes an image. With its extreme technical and visual concision, Javier Arce's work draws its complexity from intellectual references that reflect readings in a broad cultural spectrum running from philosophy to anthropology and poetry.

The pieces in this exhibition connect references from history and popular material culture to fabric design and flimsy materials, ethnographic photography, and aspects of the modernist tradition. In them, Arce explores different registers of the changing nature of cultural flows, the hybridization, and instability of cultural belonging, the unstable relation between the center and the periphery, and the marginal histories and hegemonic discourse of Western modernity. They work with the contrast between the ethnographic data in Cavilla's images, which present a world anchored in the past, and the sophisticated economic aesthetic of the Maghreb's material culture. Javier Arce’s pieces simultaneously illustrate and question the geographic, political, and cultural distances between Arab referents and the Western context.

The figuration in Cavilla's photographs have been partially masked by cloth, folded, overlapped or half hidden behind a large lattice, as a metaphor for unawareness of the other, but also to propose an exercise of attention to the viewer. The effort and satisfaction of grasping these pieces involves unhurried contemplation, which emerges as the viewer's reward: the more the viewer invests in reading the image, the more gratifying that reading will be. Arce uses this partial concealment as a means to demand attention, and to combat the anxious and instantaneous consumption of images, seeking a restful reference in the context of contemporary image consumption's velocity of escape, because, as Santiago Alba Rico also observed: speeding up the world is turning away from it.

Javier Arce has turned to the Maghreb in search of what he may not have found among us: fragments of colored cloth, cultural forms that become tradition, a warmth whose feel we no longer recall. A sad paradox of cartography, as the mythical Orient domesticated by colonial impulses—in this case, Northern Morocco—is precisely the West. Maghreb, in Arabic, means the place where the Sun sets, as opposed to Machreq, the place where it rises. This is a terrible confusion of meridians and parallels for a culture like the West, which dreamed of a world made to measure. Marrakech is as Western as Lisbon, and Esauira—a city of Phoenician origin that the Portuguese know as Mogador—is even more so. There is thus no Orientalism in these images, but rather a descent to the South in search of understanding it.

In one of the works of the show, a fragment of a photograph partially hidden behind a belt from the Atlas Mountains becomes a a sort of enveloping frame. But unlike that Western device that serves to mark the border between art and everyday life, this cloth twists around it like a serpent, embracing it like a lover to reveal even more than what it hides. Javier Arce's play is serious: he shows what can no longer be seen because it has lost the base of its meaning, its terrain, the surroundings in which these images once spoke. Once again, "what cannot be looked at becomes an image."