Saúl Kaminer
Orbits, courses and shadows of Saúl Kaminer
by Luis Ignacio Sáinz (2018)
Saúl Kaminer is a being in transit: warrior and monk, with Middle Eastern leanings, profound, thoughtful, and minimalist. He combats the secondary, eliminating ornaments and artifices, and preserves the essential, that hard core of his expression is anchored in the sobriety of space, in incessant movement, in the provocation of light and its revenge in shadow. His transcendence is that of the instant becoming a lasting breath, in infinite contradiction, where beauty shines limitlessly, without modesty or restraint. He has become more and more himself; he has shaken off, stripped himself of the essence of the body and now direct references to himself and others have faded away. He comes from within, bursting from his inner depths. He is a more sophisticated listener; he has given himself body and soul to the task of refining silence, far from noise—acoustic, metaphorical, or visual. He extends his roots into the expressive possibilities of emptiness, of nothingness—of air breathed, unseen and untouched. His braille possesses a generous foundation; in the discretion of touch, it overcomes the evocative power of words. His emblem subtlety: that strength through lightness draws forth the immateriality of multiple origins.
Everyone who has spent time thinking about Saúl’s language agrees that it strategically references interculturalism. He is a Russian (Ukrainian) Jew, a Polish Jew—a word which, as Luisa Barrios points out, traces its etymology to “the light in the stone.” At the same time, he is very Mesoamerican—very constructivist and urban—in his use of the third dimension: hence his interest in the environments, scenes, and habitats of the ancient cities of Teotihuacán, Tula, and Tenochtitlán. As if that were not enough, his identity is open, eager for an infusion of the novel and energetic. Our creator of implausible compositions, where planes and volumes blend together, where lights and shadows rejoice, flees from the typical fundamentalism of the exasperated believer. He is respectful of theological narcissism, but does not share it; instead, he searches for reasons and emotions that are freer, less pretentious, valuable in their immediacy, and fully autonomous: indifferent to the will of power or conviction. He believes in responsibility, in invention, in sensuality … in the recognition of the other as an interlocutor and as an epiphany. Sonorous materials, inaudible voices, mute sounds, eloquent silences … such coincidences of opposites fill his expansive universes, touching the orbits of their planets, comets, and moons, until they are deconstructed and given new meaning, one after the other. He appreciates this with the rigor of the poet José María Espinasa, who has succumbed since time immemorial to the temptations of the plastic arts, unable to resist the magic of those hidden sorcerers: his colleagues the artists, armed not with words but with images and sketches at the ready.
“Asideros en el vacío” [“Handles in the Void”]: how powerful is the formula that encodes one of the creator’s purposes for the future … looking for them, pronouncing them, denouncing them, proposing them, exhuming them, discovering them, or inventing them. And to exercise it on the needle of the scales, turning his back on the poles of the composition; because in its territory of orbits, paths, and shadows, they mix, blend together, overlap, replace each other, and even coexist—that which, for lack of a better term, we call figuration and abstraction. In his extensive oeuvre—composed, narrated, and exhibited on several continents, on journeys across the Atlantic and the Pacific—SK ignores the rigidity of style, since he throws himself into creating, sometimes ex nihilo, sometimes by commenting on, critiquing, or adopting vocabularies that are alien to him, yet nourishing nonetheless. He has a rather unique way of linking both aspects in a unified movement, as if they were beats and rhythmic passages, forming part of the same integrated visual, tactile, and spatial score. Serge Fauchereau has correctly pointed this out, as a constant and remote observer of Saúl’s corpus for decades; a taxonomist and interlocutor of his intellectual, emotional, and manufacturing processes; an authentic and generous voyeur of its mysteries and secrets, attempts at illumination and shadowy veils; an effective and truthful chronicler of his experiments and launching of new types, flat and voluminous, rough and smooth, sketched and built. In short, optical vibrations that delve to the bottom of the supports until they find the necessary depth, those pieces of an indefatigable tide that encompasses the last mutable space, sharing with us discreet textures and perfect polishes.
“… we run into the silence where silences are voiceless,”
“… we run into the silence where silences are voiceless,” said Octavio Paz, as if he had in mind the constellations of this blacksmith of illusions, his muffled cries of harmony—appetites that ultimately demand stage and shelter, the exactness of a lodging, since his movements tend to accumulate, reminding us that this proponent of various shapes and geometries is at his core a highly-talented builder. SK has never ceased to be an architect; he incessantly postulates segments of reality. He answered Luisa Barrios thus: “I want to keep on giving form to the idea of transformation, to keep on looking for handles in the void; I still want to be able to leap toward the precipice of creation, to think of nothing as a habitable place, to uproot myself….” Pursuing a point of equilibrium in that constant exodus, always migrating to make a home, moving to take root, stripping oneself of everything to amass truth, meaning, and intention. Tirelessly climbing a staircase, undertaking the 125 rests-challenges-rungs to be illuminated by the eternal and intangible Splendor. The art, asceticism, and mysticism of those who pursue fullness as a way of self-knowledge, of gradual improvement in the flow in others, being in them, being for them. Creating, period!
Our phenomenologist reveals himself in the scrutinizing force of language, the abjad alphabet* as a divine language, the sum of the possibilities of being and its fury, of existence and its calm, and in such coordinates his identity appears via its plurality, composed as it is of miscellaneous heritages: Mexico and its diversity, his Jewish identity, his extended residence in France, and the endless, heavenly nourishment provided by his travels, readings, and contacts. Cosmic summations and deductions thanks to the correspondences of numbers and letters, states of the possible: Gematria, Notarikon, Temurah, the Kabbalah’s paths of light and meaning, in particular those of its lantern the Zohar, written by Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai (Rashbi) around the turn of the 2nd or 3rd century CE (or, according to other sources, by Moshe ben Shem Tov of León, Spain in the 13th century CE). It is in this breeding ground where Saúl Kaminer recovers himself, even to the great depths of his traveled wisdom, which traverses the desert and its dunes, the desert and its refuges for hermits, the desert and the recluses of faith and meditation, an atmosphere that comes to him as a matter of fact, ready, a sefirotic tree that protects him from inclement weather, giving him clarity and direction.
The plastic arts as calligraphy, sculpture as calligraphy, both exercises that form a unified expression prone to articulate a kerygma, a message that announces and warns of the accidents of life, of its expectations of redemption, of its desire to overcome the banality of everyday existence. And this endeavor of dissemination finds its Kether, its Crown, the Ancient of Days, in a volatile, maleable composition — a tangible action that grows and shrinks at will, adjusting itself to the circumstances of the available space, and that in its unfolding nature fulfills what it offers: to deconstruct the habitat that absorbs or contains it. “Líneas de transmisión” (“Lines of Transmission”; 2015, steel, variable dimensions) which Armando Castellanos rightly describes as “conceptual drawing,” capable of exhausting its nature as sculpture in its formal articulation, as an installation when placed in the space of a museum, as an intervention in a room of a building. Semiological slats, one might say—or as this critic and art historian suggests: “a poem about space, time, and memory.”
In my love for its architectonic and sculptural space, with its solid philosophical antecedents, I believe SK owes us a large-format work that devours the landscape, that enhances it, revaluing the context, its scales and codes, proposing his own notion of public space. But, if I can request something, it would be a constructive rereading of the lost Merzbau works from that outlandish inventor par excellence, Kurt Schwitters,* who could make labyrinths spring from labyrinths, garnering a utopia: expansive inner space become tangible in habitable sculptures—dwellings of recollection, dedicated to its residents’ meditations on reasons, desires, emotions, and joys, on the presence of the world and the beings that give it flavor and variety.
The movements of the path that Saúl Kaminer walks, over and over again until it has been exhausted, allow us to trust that the fateful times will lessen their devastation and provide us with comfort and hope. Therefore, with the Zohar: “Blessed are the righteous of this world and of the world to come, for the Holy One, blessed be he, desires them in his glory and reveals to them the supreme mysteries of his holy name, which he has not revealed either to the highest angels nor to his saints” (Zohar, III, 78b). So be it, without harming our libertarian consciences.
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*A writing system that represents consonants but not vowels.
** Kurt Schwitters was born in Germany. For his works known as the Merzbau, he transformed the rooms of houses in Hanover, Germany; Lysaker, Norway; and Elterwater, England. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Schwitters#The_Merzbau