DANIEL SOLOMONS: ARTIST’S BOOK
There is a certain lyrical magic, hardly perceptible although latent, in Daniel Solomons’ artistic production (Madrid 1977); lyrical magic which is defined and lies in the deep polysomic circumstance of his work. Perhaps that border quality is revealed in the terms of postmodern invention, i.e. a project as open as occlusive and determining, a repeated round trip journey, perhaps in search of an illusion of coldness in the warm south. Jean Cocteau insisted: I write as if I draw, I paint as if I write, I film as if I compose, my goal has been to cast out the nines, the prince of the avant‐garde was referring to the Nine Muses, the nine disciplines of the imagination and intellect, and in the case of Cocteau curiosity did not kill the cat which survived its seven lives.
The initiative of the Municipal Book Institute (MBI) to cooperate in the publication of a plaquette, almost a minimalist book of poems, about the walkable space that Solomons currently practices, was born out of the mimetically and appropriate original search –more about trends than forms, a result of an unpredictable and aesthetic cul‐de sac‐ in which this artist has based his works since, apparently, abandoning his paintings, and addressing his interest towards an unlimited field of objectual expansion, flavoured by a unique reading experience ‐which ultimately is the best possibility‐, about the so‐called poetry of thought of the symbol and abstraction. Not in vain Solomons’ selection of quotes chosen for this book belong to contemporary writers such as Octavio Paz, Elizabeth Bishop, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, Celan Valéry , Steiner , Sarduy , among others , opening with a sentence by the universal Elías Canetti : The second meeting always destroys the first. Should there only be first meetings?
From that aspiration of lineage to the service of icy material change that is presented, the title of this publication is born, In Between, that Daniel has christened this series of brilliant, polished and reinvented pieces, with coloured vinyls as neutral light planes, phrases to lurk that link to each other, objects of an ambiguous nature with sharpened contours that offer the voyeur aquatic mirages in the middle of the desert; going further I offer a poetic licence, these pieces are immerged in a band of fog harder than steel. The Municipal Book Institute announced, at its beginnings, its desire to allow for interdisciplinary contamination, and this has been achieved: in its more than 10 years of cultural interaction the MBI has, undoubtedly, strengthened all literary genres –poetry, essays, novels‐, not forgetting other disciplines of art such as music and art. Its fundamental vocation has been achieved and this is evidenced, once again, with this plaquette. As if this were a futuristic or imagist manifest, more unknown but more courteous, thereby totally rejecting the conception of cataloguing. In the following pages, nothing is catalogued, only the correspondence between poetry and art is printed under Daniel Solomons’ mandate. He has elaborated “the artist’s book”, photographed hereunder, within reach of those who wish to cross the border in which we move tirelessly. “Artists’ books“ are to the edition what the “happenings, performances, installations, boxes‐containers, and other variations on the same subject are to contemporary art.
The plastic artists turn books into objective mechanisms, at least in what they refer to the word, the word is reused, reinvented, materialised, the literary code, and typographical, are associated with the visual code. It is a bridge that has been crossed over several times, but nevertheless is still exciting: Mallarmé‘s dream would have been painting his poems, the same as Gustave Moreau writing his paintings, not to mention Oscar Wilde, as critic‐artist, or Guillaume Apollinaire, with his calygra ms and ideograms that sketched the Eiffel Tower, let us remember the editorial wonders of Lissitzky, Vostel, Beuys up to Ruscha’s books , whose books “ Twenty six Gasoline Station and Every Building on the Sunset Strip, have both become paradigms of this genre that combine the literary and plastic expressions like nobody.
Nowadays where the Guttenberg era, i.e. paper books, is being questioned by environments not pertaining to this sector but to technology, faster than thought, it is surprising that a young artist takes an interest in the classical book as an instrument to narrate his process. In any case, the original can never be substituted by a copy, even though Walter Benjamin wrote the opposite with the lucidity that characterises him. Perhaps for this reason, we adhere to Irma Boom’s manifest, one of the last ideologist and creator of art books: “a screen is flat, a paper book opens up, you must turn the pages, it can be handled and it is profound”.
Daniel Solomons knows this and cultivates it, hence we publish In between.
Alfredo Tajan
Art Critic, Poet and Cultural Manager