BARCELONA, SPAIN.- Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) presents Carlos Pazos. Tell me nothing, on view through May 6, 2007. This exhibition of works by Carlos Pazos (Barcelona, 1949) takes a look over more than 30 years of the career of this artist. Far from the conventional format of retrospective exhibitions, Tell me nothing does not follow any linear or formal evolution; rather it seeks to reconstruct the ecosystems of Pazos’ work.

It is almost impossible to dissociate Pazo’s facet as artist from that of collector of objects. This project will set out to question the very structure of the exhibition, deconstructing the notions of authorship, originality, culture, work of art or collecting, amongst others. Trying not to give a single vision and reading of his work, the exhibition will break with the usual logic of the distribution of works to show the different trajectories, accumulations and voids.

Pazos, at best the object of stereotypical readings that have either placed him at some eccentric point or assimilated him within the generous confines of Conceptual practice, is the creator of rich microcosms of self-reference. Ecosystems that evolve between the terseness of negation and the voluptuousness of pure accumulation; between ‘I’d rather not’ as spoken by Bartleby – Melville’s hero of refusal, ensconced in silence, ascetic figure without the gift to rebelliousness – and the unlikely archive in which Bouvard and Pécuchet seek to make a critical record of accepted ideas in their Dictionary.

Pazos’ work resides within the framework of an aesthetics of silence, understood as a longing for nothingness in the face of the loss of innocence and the realization of the impossibility of the image constituting a reality. The politics of identity (silenced behind a narcissistic mask), objectual poetics (along with souvenirs uprooted from their real time) and the taste for the abject (now declined as a fetish) are the threads running through all the noise with which Carlos Pazos constructs his silence: to say there is nothing left to say.

This attitude grows up within the break in the supposed correspondence between words and things that swept away modernity and opened the floodgates of the so-called crisis of representation. The models of this ‘loud silence’ are numerous (in literature, we might mention Hofmannsthal and Mallarmé, Beckett and Thomas Bernhardt), but one can establish a paradigmatic sequence that links, with the melancholy of one who surrenders to the impossibility of an original presence, Duchamp’s ready-made with Warhol’s industrial repetition in series. It is somewhere along this line, to which should be added Marcel Broodthaers’ attraction to nothingness, that Pazos’ work is located.

Now then, in his case, this ‘saying nothing’ that articulates the poetics of silence takes the artist himself as object of reflection, as evidenced in the works Voy a hacer de mí una estrella (1975) or Conocerle es amarle (1977). Pazos, in reference to his beginnings, states: “I wanted to be nothing. In reality, I didn’t to be. But since I was... [...] If you’re going to be something, it let be nothing. If you’re going to be somewhere, let it be among the stars. Be a star.” This is an approach as ironic as it is antidotal, for the will to be a ‘star’ is, in reality, a way of losing oneself in an image, a strategy for hiding oneself behind an empty mask.

Collage as a procedure, collage as a representation of emptiness

Pazos’ early work fell under the banner of European Pop Art, and he developed it towards the language of the object, of the assemblage and of the association of meanings, with a strong kinship with Arte Povera, within which was highlighted the element of the everyday and its iconographic codes. Despite his training within the collage tradition (after studying architecture, he went to art college, Escola Eina, where he found a mentor in Albert Ràfols-Casamada) Pazos’ approach diverges radically from that of the previous generation (for whom the fragment of the everyday object had a mystical sense) and from the ultra-real sense which the Conceptuals gave it. In the case of Pazos, reality is included in the works as emptiness: there is no reference from art and the object always relates to fiction. This tension between the collage, the fragment of reality, and the representation of emptiness is one of the most interesting attributes of the Pazian world, which links it with the concept of abject as posited by Bataille and lends it great currency.

Collecting as a process: recycling nothingness

A retrospective is, inherently, based on a procedure of collecting. And collecting (or hoarding) constitutes the base of Carlos Pazos’ artistic endeavour. In addition to having the nature of meta-collection, the exhibition at the MACBA stresses the raw material employed by the artist: his stock of collections. This cabinet of curiosities or ‘sentimental museum’, into which he allows us a glance, like of sort of open-house at his studio, suggests his artistic quality or potential, ‘uterus’ of all work, in his own words.

Indeed, in the Pazos oeuvre it is difficult to draw a chronological, biographical or evolutionary sequence. The impulse to “accumulate, with obsessive covetousness, bits of the past, with or without pedigree, in order to ‘appease’ nostalgic longings”, in the face of the impossibility of acceding to any system of universal and Idealist knowledge, substitutes formal evolution. Pazos reads the material world of objects, he deciphers earlier works of art, which he melts down, filters and resituates in a different – his own – way, revealing fresh relations and transfiguring this raw material by lending it a new meaning.

For Pazos, the evocative power of objects invokes time lived, the fleeting experience that cannot be caught except in its trail of objects. Thus he speaks literally of souvenirs: “the memory is what you’ve lost, the souvenir is what you have.” The souvenir articulates, then, an art of the memory, but of the memory of nothing real or, at best, of the memory of the artifice. It is an armament for withstanding the passage of time. If the star was the image without original, the souvenir (a cliché, a prefab memory) appears as an object without background; two manners of amputation which lead to almost nothing.

A Global Vision

Tell me nothing does not follow any linear or formal evolution; rather it seeks to reconstruct the ecosystems of Pazos’ work as they have been described, in broad terms, above. In this way, the spectator can enjoy, for the first time, a global and exhaustive vision of an artist who, without presuming to do more than “‘to kill time’ [...] with the desire to cheat the irremediable fraud of life”, strikes at the heart of a present marked by the ecology of emptiness.

The exhibition includes a film-collage produced especially for this occasion: Mnemocine. Película recortable (2006-2007), conceived and made by Pazos as a synthesis and ‘audiovisual cataloguing’ of his career. This cinema of the memory, revisiting of forms and genres, contains the key to the Pazian microcosm: a reflection – more or less ironic, more or less nostalgic, but always whimsical and with a theatrical touch – on the absurdity of life. Comprised of a succession sketches without any overall plot, such that each fragment has its own narrative logic, Mnemocine is made by means of ‘cut-and-paste’, one of the artist’s quintessential techniques. As Pazo’s himself said upon receiving the National Plastic Arts Prize in 2004, “for me, life is a collage. The cut it up and paste it just as I do with images or objects. I like