Glossary

diagram, various dimensions, 2007

Glossary is a diagram that engages the entire wall. According to the artist, it represents an attempt at ordering the fundamental concepts, ideas, and interrelations of his work. But in stepping closer, the viewer ascertains that the bodies of text and the graphical structures are not necessarily connected in the  way that might be expected of a diagram: the visual and cognitive web is actually bewildering. A feeling arises as if one were glimpsing the thoughts of another  person, with fragments and slivers of ideas connected through associative lines. Correlated are a telephone conversation about terrorism, a theatrical play
thematising utopian architectural projects, or lists of names or terms, consequently effecting an interrelation of the personal, the societal, and the political.  The fragments corresponding to the random configuration of memory compose an especial archaeology of knowledge, but with no pretences whatsoever of imparting reality. Each new presentation of Glossary is expanded and changed, with the previous versions serving as foundations for the ensemble. The outcome of Baladrán’s research is not an artefact but rather an open structure that always points to external sources and contexts and includes manifold individual entries.
‘In art, as in society and the individual, one can find specific maps. Some lines present something, others are abstract. Some are with segments, others without. (. . .)
We think that the lines are constitutional parts of the things and events. Therefore everything has its geography, its cartography, its diagram’ (Gilles Deleuze).
 Anne Faucheret

Crunch time

exhibition at Castillo / Corrales, Paris, 2008