Registered®
Sometimes a literal approach is a more profitable generator of meaning. This is specially true when the most popular meaning of a word is subjected to the definitions of the law, and it is submitted to the guidance of a proper usage. Sometimes, in addition, the meaning might be a compounder of endless tautologies. Once you write these words, you can’t escape their redundancy. Bravo! Here’s where figurative use melts finally with its background.
«Registered Blackboard», an exercice in tautology
Wearing Type
Actually, this is not mere coincidence. I suspect that branding, at its best, does just that. M is for “Macula”, for stain, blemish. In short, M is for evidencing an error, an accident. I’m featuring a scene of Fritz Lang’s “M” because there is a relationship with type that awakens a profound fear, one that we’ve learned somehow to trivialize. Wearing this grammatical layer can leave no one neutral. I guess that is because, under these circumstances, one always stands out.
Peter Lorre in Fritz Lang's "M", and a trendy peepingMonster t-shirt.
Las fitografías del amor
Sí, ya lo sé, otro neologismo, pero este creo que es merecedor de su etimología. Siempre ha existido cierta tensión entre el trazo gráfico y el sustrato sobre el que se aplica. Hay una cierta relación entre el esfuerzo mecánico que se ejerce sobre el soporte y la ansiedad que provoca la «impermanencia» de la palabra. Podríamos decir que el mayor grado de ansiedad se pone de manifiesto en las inscripciones sobre piedra. El caso que nos concierne ahora, el de la fitografía, es relevante, más que por su «impermanencia», por sus metamorfosis. Lo primero que debemos reconocer es que son palabras y heridas. ¿Quién nos va a negar que el amor no conlleva el padecimiento de cierta traumatología? Lo segundo que hay que admitir es que el sustrato, al estar vivo, aporta sus propias manipulaciones a la forma tipográfica y nos propone un continuo de versiones en constante mutación que sugieren por supuesto su inminente fin.
"Rosa quiere a Aitor"
Image of Ambiguity
When Jasper Johns told us that we “…cannot paint an image of the number seven” that we “…can only paint a number seven”, I was happy to have inherited a certain amount of discursive stability. Frankly, at the moment, I couldn’t agree more. Having bypassed somehow all those conflicts of representation, I had to agree that, indeed, the conventions of the sign seemed to introduce a tangible opportunity to better exploit certain ways of communication.
"One can only print ambiguity". Colección Actual. Plataforma Editorial, Barcelona.
The Luxor Garage
It doesn’t happen often, but, now and then, I see myself unwillingly practicing a kind of urban archeology. Most of the time, it happens around the contested territories of «street art» where the push and pull of prominence is delivered without mercy and erasure is a common activity. It’s only rarely that I’m surprised by another kind of loss, one that usually we consider out of that perpetually unsolved conflict. The rarest of cases takes place when, in addition, one has taken casual documentation of the lost object months or years before, and, in a kind of awakening scenario, one looks dumbfounded at what it’s now its absence. It happened the other day on «carrer de Neptú». The Luxor Garage is no longer standing. I remember taking a few shots of the great typography that announced its services.
The Luxor Garage at carrer de Neptú, Barcelona