Miguel Trelles: Forking Paths

May 21 – July 14, 2005
Reflecting upon the initiation of an alternative art space and on the conditions of urban life in late capitalism, a time when real urgencies and epiphanies are easily absorbed and dismissed, Jorge Luis Borges’ sardonic words - “There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless”- take germane specificity. (1)

“Miguel Trelles: Forking Paths” brings to Boston a selection of landscape works by New York based, Puerto Rican born artist Miguel Trelles. Most recently featured in the group show Spanic Attack in Lima Peru (2004), included in Voces y Visiones: Highlights from El Museo del Barrio Permanent Collection (2003-2004), and following solo shows at Real Artways in Hartford Connecticut (2004) and at the Furman Gallery at Lincoln Center in New York (2003), Trelles continues to pursue his interest in Chinese paintings, particularly those of the Song and Yuan Dynasties, embodied into a style that the artist has denominated Chino Latino.

While the anecdotal origins of Trelles’ pictorial language involve his father’s dinnertime stories about his forays into Havana’s Chinatown (thus, the encounter with an alien other as narrated by another), as well as the hubristic challenge to the Caribbean brand of Eurocentrism of his upbringing, the introduction of the Chinese dimension into Trelles’ work is inextricably linked to an early induction into the world of literature, especially the short stories by Jorge Luis Borges, and to his initial academic training in art history.

A life lived in the periphery has probably triggered the artist’s search of a path on the question of boundaries. Trelles knows the long Western history of looking at the Orient as a source of artistic inspiration. Yet, “knowing—and choosing—from a great tradition is at the heart of what Trelles has set out to do”. “In a world full of reproductions”, “choosing what not to see is the more difficult decision. The choice implies a recognition of what is chosen and leaves the artist relatively free to focus on creative reading—the artist paradoxically claims it’s a “mis-reading”—of art as a source for art”. (2)

Trelles reproduces the practice of painting from reproductions, creating a body of work that proceeds as a consequence of an individual’s respectful engagement with copies of works of art that do exist, and that form the very foundation of a culture in a perfected form. Trelles’ paintings do not aim to be copies in the spirit of the originals, much like the copies by Chinese artists themselves. Freely adapting or “erroneously reading” the brush structure of Chinese masterpieces, hybridizing these constructs with other recognizable Eurocentric gestures and styles, and ultimately instilling his diasporic Antillean experience and self, Trelles reproduces a range of mutating orders that transmit a radically new vision of the Caribbean, a fictional one. (3)

“Places of this kind are outside of all places”. Trelles’ landscapes are a network of points that connect and intersect, of spaces of simultaneity, of juxtaposition, that themselves also proliferate and fork, and that signal to the “epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed”. (4) Interestingly, some of Trelles’ pictorial spaces become somewhat like counter-sites, places where the enacted utopias can be found, and are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.

Trelles’ fascination with the past -especially Chinese orthodox painting- sets him apart from most of his contemporaries, however, his work addresses the new century’s sense of fragmentation, and efforts at reconfiguring the broken pieces of the modern world into a multiplicity of new cultural arrangements. His palette ranges from the reductive broad black strokes that evoke rock formations and trees in space (which exhume a more purist relationship with the Chinese referents), to a vivid symbiosis of impossibly bright colors that exude the flamboyance of the tropics, and that “are vaguely redolent of bubblegum and comic book art”. (5)

Chino Latino points to quintessential Postmodernist ideas of the decenteredness of meaning, the valorization of autonomy, the regained importance of the local and the particular, the recombination of values, and towards the infinite possibilities of the human existence.

Trelles’ work is contentious, and aims to differentiate this moment, this reading, from the ones before it. His enlightened and beautiful landscapes affirm a space of fluid cultural boundaries and complex porous identities, which are true expressions of contemporary sentiments. The coexistence, in a kind of collage or pastiche, of different cultures, perspectives, time periods, and ways of reading attempts to emulate Borges’ literary concoctions as laboratory demonstrations - or parlor games. A reference to an imaginary country leads the author deeper into a different linguistic reality, like the “novel whose narrator would omit or disfigure facts and develop various contradictions in a manner that would allow a few - a very few - readers to divine an appalling or banal reality”. (6)

“Miguel Trelles: Forking Paths” aims to take the viewer through a tour of the stylistic variations taken by the artist within his Chino Latino language of landscape during the period from 2001 to 2005. Contemplating its own point of departure, Space Other starts by situating “Miguel Trelles: Forking Paths” in an initial meeting with the space: a virtual Chinese garden.

The Chinese city was Confucian, and oriented toward regulation of the social group. The Chinese garden, on the other hand, provided a contrast to the stifling urban regularity. The garden was Daoist, and provided a private, liberating experience for the individual. The first Chinese literati gardens appeared during the Northern and Southern dynasties (420-589). These are the most intimate of Chinese gardens and were created as a place of retreat for the gentleman-scholar to escape the chaos of city life. The Chinese literati gardens symbolized a world which lay beyond limited social concerns and embodied a different, broader range of philosophical interests.

It was following the collapse of the Tang dynasty (618-907) that the literati garden reached its height. Reclusion took on a new immediacy as members of society dreamed of finding sanctuary from a disintegrating social order. The development of landscape painting as an independent genre is intrinsically related to life in the Chinese gardens of the literati. Going beyond representation, scholar-artists like the late Ming dynasty Dong Qichang (1555-1636), imbued their paintings with their personal feelings and idiosyncrasies.

“I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths”, wrote to an unforeseen audience Ts’ui Pên, the character referenced in Jorge Luis Borges’ The Garden of Forking Paths (El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan), a unique spy story about an impossible book and a mythical labyrinth (7). Like in all fictional works, each time one is confronted with several alternatives, one must choose a path and eliminates the others. Trelles’ bravado attempts to echo Borges’ character Ts’ui Pen, he chooses simultaneously - all of them.

As Dr. Yu Tsun, former professor of English at the Hochschule at Tsingtao (the unsuspected double agent in Borges’ The Garden of Forking Paths) wrote:

“Absorbed in these illusory images, I forgot my destiny of one pursued. I felt myself to be, for an unknown period of time, an abstract perceiver of the world”. (8)

Gamaliel R. Herrera

Notes:

1. Jorge Luis Borges, from “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote”.
2. John R. Findlay, “Chinese Landscapes of the Greater Antilles”, in Chino Latino (2002): 6.
3. Ingrid M. Jimenez, “Miguel Trelles Arsenal de la Puntilla”, ArtNexus No. 49 (June 2003).
4. Michel Foucault, “Des Espace Autres,” published by the French journal Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité in October, 1984, was the basis of a lecture given by in March 1967. Translation Jay Miskowiec.
5. Miguel Trelles, Artist’s Statement, in Artists’ Alliance (2000).
6. Jorge Luis Borges, OC1:431/CF:68.
7. Jorge Luis Borges, from “The Garden of the Forking Paths”.
8. Ibid.