Let’s go back to 2003, when you literally cut the book S,M,L,XL that records the journey and the poetic history of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (O.M.A) founded in Rotterdam by Dutch famed architect Rem Koolhaas. The gesture of slicing the fashionable book made in collaboration with the postmodern designer Bruce Mau to transform it into a tautology of its title is comical, but also suggests a desire to use architecture as a model to be cut à la Gordon Matta-Clark.

Its very interesting you point back to the cut of the book S,M,L,XL as an origin for the cutouts works. In a very different scale to Matta-Clark, cutting a book is the same as cutting a building; it’s an object not understood to be a primary material, an object not understood to be malleable once it’s built. As Matta-Clark did, I understand it as a reversed form of construction: To build by destroying. At the time, back in 2003, I had a grant for a project of artistic research on the possible meanings derived from applying physical actions like cutting, burning, pulverizing, bending, stretching, breaking, wrinkling, smashing, etc. as a creative strategy, a sort of alchemist process of destruction in order to create.

Matta-Clark was also fascinated with photography in his early work as a form of alchemy, but later on as an understated, cutting tool or a documentary extension for his building’s cuts. You have worked with photography as a form of mediation for your interventions and sculptures, but also as a mirage. Is the negative space you create by piercing documentary photography an attempt to undermine its blatant realism?

I believe that by piercing or “cutting out” the central subject in documentary photography, I compel the viewer to imagine, as an act of creativity. I recall Joseph Albers, writing in his book Interaction of Color: If one says “red” (the name of a color) and there are 50 people listening, it can be expected that there will be 50 reds in their minds. And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different... So, if there is an image of something as iconic as Le Corbusier’s Ville Savoye, for example, but it’s not there...I will therefore complete the image in my head, but my Ville Savoye, according to my memory and imagination, might not be your Ville Savoye and certainly might not be the exact real Ville Savoye; I’m interested in these gaps of translation.

In the cutout series you appropriated widely known images such as Giacometti in his studio, Yves Klein during his Anthropometries, Gilbert and George portrayed in a park as well as recorded performances such as Klein’s The Void’s photographed by Harry Shunk. Noticeably you also included a portrait of Lygia Clark coolly seated next to her Unidades No.1 to No.7 during the Mostra Neoconcreta in Rio de Janeiro in 1959. How did you select the images for the cutouts given the fact that many of them belong to different moments of twentieth century art history (the avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde)? Also, they emphasize the dominant role of the artist in the narratives built by Western historiographies.

There are diverse intentions I had in the selection process, which intersect each other. The tautology on selecting images of artists applying physical processes in their work in a physically intervened image; also to dismantle or question the Western grand male narrative of the value of the work as a result of the artist as character. To question without answers, whether the artist’s personality is embedded in the work, wants it or not. There is quite an extensive production of “unofficial” photographs of artists beside or making their work, that I wanted to use as primary or raw material to make them contradictorily “official”.

In addition to a gender critique, were you particularly taken by Clark’s use of industrial paint and wood in the works that appear in the background of her portrait? I can see a connection to the sculptures you made combining industrial and vernacular materials as a mode of critique to concrete art’s reductionism.

Now that you mention it I think I did, yes, but not with conscious purpose. I do find Lygia Clark’s work of great influence, and some of my past sculptures have been very close to hers including one that is actually produced after her titled Bicho Gigante. I used her method or strategy by constructing large scale wooden boxes that functioned in the same way matchboxes do, where the inner “drawer” or “container” for the matches can slide in both ways, so I would have a sculpture that could be always different yet the same, thanks to its possibility of arrangements.

Do the selected images oversimplify our understanding of the works?

I found it quite fascinating to discover that most artists, excluding only a very few, have been photographed beside their work or while executing it; creating almost derivatively, a photographic thematic subject in itself, very rarely exhibited.

To cut an image, to fragment its content especially if the image is publicly recognizable, is an attempt to erase the history of its production. Do the cutout series attest to an absence of context?

Over the last, let’s say fifty years, the world has consumed more images than in all of its previous existence. It happens now that we “construct” ourselves through image, whether it is a narrative of personal identity by a simple family photo album or collective memory through images of human accomplishments, it has become a strategy that can be either used for good or bad purposes; I won’t list examples, as everyone knows about fascist propaganda or capitalist advertisement. I don’t think they attest to an absence of context but rather appeal to the common universal memory. I use images everyone above a certain age has seen many, many times, so even if the main character or central subject is not there, we still see it, it’s still there. Gerard Genette coined the terms autographic and allographic. An autographic work is one, like in painting, in which the material support can’t be destroyed without destroying the work itself. An allographic work, on the other hand, resides not in its physical support but on its ideal content. Therefore, when I cut an image, I intend to work with in both these terms.

Is this distortion another way to explore the discrepancy between collective memory and the production of history?

Definitely. History is a crafted product which collective memory shouldn’t have to abide by.

But the artists portrayed on the photographs, and the system that determines how history is written and therefore remembered seems to define the intention for the cutouts, right?

Yes It does, it points it out. For selecting the images, I’ve taken into account certain specific periods or geographical areas of artistic production, or even certain groups like when I did a series of cutouts of only minimal American sculptors.

As an artist born and based in Mexico, your relationship to geometric abstraction and Kinetic art is distant and unfamiliar to your formation, and perhaps even problematic. However, Minimalism is closer to the practice of Mathias Goeritz, a German-born Mexican artist who taught at the School of Architecture at the Instituto Tecnológico de la Universidad de Guadalajara.

Absolutely, Mathias Goeritz was a key figure, not as sufficiently known as he should have been in the artistic context of Mexico, but also specifically in Guadalajara, and in relation to architecture. He was very close to Luis Barragán, as you know. In the 1950s, he made what is now Museo El Eco as the total work of art; it was a building but also a sculpture, designed under his ideas of emotional geometry yet with Minimalist aesthetics, in order to produce a quasi-mystical sensorial perception of space. At school I was taught under these guidelines for artistic practice, in Architecture. I tend to link this to my admiration for Dan Flavin’s work.

Goeritz, who is often paired to Lygia Clark, co-authored with Barragán the term “emotional architecture” as an oppositional force to functionalism in architecture. He also wrote the “Fed Up manifesto” (Estoy Harto, 1960), in which he aimed to reconcile art with spiritual life in spite of artistic egotism and the artificial means of the art system. Is Goeritz’s “prayer” a discursive foundation for your cutouts?

I think searching for something that is absent can be a spiritual quest. It can be a starting point for an entropic journey. I always agreed with the quest for emotional architecture rather than just an aesthetical perspective, or how can you be spiritually struck by a work of art, but in the broadest sense of spirit. I was never moved by the catholic imagery used by Goeritz, as I was by his golden monochromes, which could be like Rothko’s black paintings at the Menil chapel in Houston.