Just as poetry can veer towards the novel, or what begins as fiction can enter the world of the real, in the work of Daniel Besoytaorube, pictorial matter transmutes into poetic matter, addresses the viewer and speaks to them, or more precisely, asks them a question: there was a cliff here and now there is the horizontal line of a tide, at high tide; between one and the other, 65 Finlands, 307 kilometers, almost 8 seasons to return to the same winter: what operation, mathematical or logical, can count at the same time in meters, in trees and in years? And what movement, if not that of the artist, can bring the number—6000 times 6000—the letter, the word, the tidal line, the wood, the distance, into the same sensible universe, which even in abstraction finds plastic materials, alive, malleable?
The question is formulated with words: it is the graphic materiality of the letter that is pronounced. A letter that is a stroke, a mark, a scratch on the surface. But which also becomes the irretrievable black line of what can no longer be read, a negative imprint. The canvas is a superposition of morphological structures from different eras, bearing traces of a previous writing. Stories, epistolary exchanges between Quiroga and Martínez Estrada, constellations of phrases and signs, references like encrypted anecdotes. Or unexpected ways of crossing worlds, as in the “Duets,” meaningful series in which coincidence—that spontaneous way of being of the real—also becomes sensible matter. What path can be traced between Camus and Nietzsche? Or is it perhaps between the word “Camus” and the word “Nietzsche”? How many letters should be drawn along the way?
In italics, so that the line crossing behind is finally traced? And if we cut off the heads of those two words? Perhaps a third will grow—as in “The Tsarinas”—or FINLAND will become—finally—FIN (end).
In Besoytaorube’s work, color—or its absence—is a language in itself. Slate grays, whites that suggest the erosion of light. And if there are no words, there is the sea. A sea that speaks in an enveloping way. In the background or on the surface, in tension between the pictorial and the conceptual. The sea is a border, a threshold. The wave is measured, and the sway, an interval. The tide tables are records that—far from taming the movement of water—become, once again, a poetic gesture. And the mathematization of the sea is a vibration of images, vestiges, instants that pause on the acrylic and cardboard surface of a tide book that has abandoned the sand: something of time that becomes pigment.
Between Brighton and Biarritz, for example, it is Mar del Plata that emerges. A third excluded or an off-stage that is always about to arrive. Like a question that besieges and does not wish to be named, that is spoken of laterally in references and dialogues—characters circulate who commit a delightful group suicide, philosophers who die in outlandish ways. The question of death is posed, but not in a grandiose manner. As in García Reig’s story, which gives this exhibition its title: “You Will Return in Winter.” When I read it, I told Daniel: I wish this story ended earlier. That there was a crossing of worlds and that it remained unresolved. I wish it ended here, in this paragraph. Once again, the cliff. Something seems about to fall. Something imminent. If it ended here, instead… When we left, that paragraph, that same paragraph, in the back seats of Daniel’s car, in his work “Seven Sisters”. Then, yes, “You Will Return in Winter”: something of the order of the occurrence, of what bursts forth without being fully summoned, a figure, an extraordinary event, like a spark or a suspended catenary. And it does not enter the fantastic, it stays there, it holds on the edge for one more moment. A fragile balance, like the stroke that sustains it: the rare work of desire, the wonder of the real.