Mario Núñez: The Vestige of Impermanence
“Truth exists in spite of us . . .”
Valerie Campos, January 20, 2021
Aesthetics does not have to seek to understand works of art as hermeneutic objects, but, in any case, what must be understood is their incomprehensibility. The aesthetic experience destroys comprehension because there is no script—that is, there is no pre-established way to read works of art, and even in their predetermined forms, concepts do not arrive at the content of imagination. Art is an abstract, metaphysical term that continues to be subject to profound disputes, given that its definition is open to multiple interpretations that vary depending on the culture, the era, the movement, or the society. The name of science or art arises after linking observations regarding the nature, function, and qualities of beings and their symbols in order to create a system of instruments or rules directed in its entirety toward the same object.
That is the most general meaning of art. In that sense, the world, not its existential limitations, is the object of art. In some psychoanalytic conceptions, truths have the structure of fiction, and to gain access to them, we must first clear away every classification, boundary, and preconceived notion, because the visible is only an isolated example, and it is certain that, in spite of us, the other truths live and coexist in absolutely all things and manifest themselves in an amplified sense, frequently contradicting the rational experiences of the past.
In this movement of yielding and withdrawing, the work of Mario Núñez does not allow itself to be easily grasped. Because of the originality of his paintings, they cannot be seen as a series of instructions to produce a mechanical result. His work separates itself from an oppressive reality, constructing through a wager on the freedom of its pictorially pure relationships. By using various plastic media he is freed from an exercise in mere reproduction, giving his works an autonomous force both expressive and evocative, while testing a fundamental approach that could be formulated like so: If thinking of painting implies investigating art’s own capacity for creation and, therefore, that from which we think, then we must ask ourselves again about the possibilities of language and its complex relationship with thought.
The artist’s knowledge consists primarily in possessing a set of interdependent abilities used to form and discard habits when necessary. Kant is very clear in establishing that the product is what serves as the model of judgment. The contemporary philosopher Nelson Goodman adopted a constructive position regarding a standardized reading of the work of Wittgenstein, in search of a habit of using language that would not lead to the mistakes that have solidified philosophical speculation. Goodman confronts this reading from the conviction that all habits that constitute knowledge provide, depending on the people and the moments in life, both resources and a richness that should be balanced and corresponded, not diminished. It is from this position that he develops a complex structuralist analysis of the theory of signs, signaling that it is impossible to imitate reality as it is, because every vision is always accompanied by an interpretation following certain conventions.
Thus we can say that through his work Mario Núñez does no less than resume his inquiry into the nature of metaphor (and its variant metonymy), not just as a rhetorical technique but as the dynamism and activity through which the painting itself unfolds. Here I mean painting in the broadest sense of “poiesis,” that is, as action, production, creation—but also as time, space, object, container, force, essence, or the very power of language itself. Because of this, I prefer not to point out the informal references, influences, or chromatic similarities, including with their respective artistic vanguards. The particular authenticity of Mario’s work does not derive from a dialogue with the great masters of painting, but from an ironic detachment from every gratuitous transfiguration regarding the discourse that, seemingly every day in Mexico, demands greater precision
In sum, the work of Mario Núñez invites us to go beyond comprehension, to leave it outside or hide it, in a sense, while it frees up a multiplicity of possible interpretations. Consequently, his work concerns the instantaneous transformation of perceptions and the vestige of impermanence itself; the challenge consists in freeing experience from the underlying need to act. The work of Mario Núñez, from within and without, seems to walk us toward an eternal return: a thin thread that, in its complexity, ties together all the fields of human experience that can occur on the same canvas; the idyllic romance between the line and the masterful use of color that speaks of an important instrument for rediscovering the interpretations of visual innovation in contemporary Mexican expressionism; a challenge that becomes diluted in its inevitable contradictions, in its pictorial nihilism, and in the very heterogeneity of city and landscape in his utopic compositions.
