Absolute Spaces, Concrete Spaces
Different spaces or rooms imprint different associations and feelings on our consciousness. A palace transmits to us the sensation of human greatness and power; a concert hall, a shared aesthetic time; a school, the experience of companionship as well as that of triumphs and defeats; a hospital, illness and death but also healing and recovery; a church or a cloister, the feeling of the sacred and also of life transitions. Evidently, these associations are linked to the experience of having spent a certain amount of time in the respective places, but, above all, these feelings respond to the fact that human beings build their cities in accordance with their condition: their mortality and fragility generate hospitals and cemeteries; their capacity to learn and the need to socialize create schools; the political nature of man produces the different spaces of power; the religious substrate of the human person is manifested in temples; etc. On the one hand, these places have an inherent meaning through the use for which they were built. On the other, individual experience colours, in accordance with the specifically lived events, the meaning that each person gives to a particular space. The aforementioned associations are hence linked to an experience – both prefigured and lived – of the place in question. The way in which exterior, objective, social space is connected to inner, subjective, intimate space thus emerges.
There is an essential correspondence between the experience of learning and a school, between the sensation of power and a palace, or between the feeling of the sacred and a church.
In the Cartesian philosophical tradition, reflective consciousness is in contrast with the outer sphere, with the world of the senses. Descartes saw in the subjective self-consciousness the fundament against scepticism, Kant fostered subjectivism by stating the impossibility of knowing “the thing in itself”, and German Idealism even maintained that the world is created by the subject. Within this tradition of thought, the leading role clearly belongs to the inner sphere of the person. By unilaterally founding knowledge in human consciousness, the outer world appears as something that exists solely as a function of the inner self-reflection. The consciousness of the subject is the sole absolute and hence comprehension of the outer world becomes problematic. In the end, then, subjectivism leads to generalised doubt regarding the reality of the outer world, i.e., precisely to the scepticism that Descartes sought to refute. St. Augustine coined the fitting image of the “vast palaces of memory”, which establishes that connection between inner and exterior space which subjectivist philosophy subsequently complicated. By means of this metaphor, St. Augustine expressed how, in a certain sense, the inner sphere possesses the same qualities as a large space with an endless number of rooms. Our mind is like a building in which perceptions, thoughts and feelings reside, that is, life experiences in the outer world interact with the inner sphere.
Now, among other things, the installations by J. Ignacio Díaz de Rábago show the multiple passages existing between the inner and outer sphere. In the series of installations under the title “The Library of Babel”, Díaz de Rábago illustrates in a most suggestive way the abysmal facet of any library. The books that levitate – or fall? – upward and threaten to destroy the strict order of library cataloguing, show how the individual runs the risk of losing himself in cultural tradition. Perhaps it would be feasible to interiorize the contents of a given library by a skilled reader, but the references inscribed in the volumes of this same library – references that lead to the entire history of universal culture – would exceed in every sense both the outerness and innerness of this selfsame reader. On the other hand, the reference to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel also suggests the continuity between the inner and outer sphere. The story that appears in Book 11 of Genesis narrates how the ambition to reach the heavens arises from inside man and how this ambition becomes concrete, exterior, in the form of a huge tower. This building is, however, frustrated by divine intervention and those viewing the installation are exposed to the futility of this timeless dream, manifested in so many outer ways, of being the master of all things.
Similarly, the installation “Numbered Room II” shows the porosity existing between the inner and outer world. The installation refers, on the one hand, to very specific exterior spaces: to the city of Gijón, by means of the colours green and red, and to the Principality of Asturias, via the piled up cider crates. At the same time, the arches and the rectangular area belong to another type of space, as they refer to the capacity of the human mind to conceive ideal forms. Whether these ideal forms reach us via a Platonic anamnesis, whether we abstract them from the world of the senses or whether we deduce them exclusively by means of our reason is, within this context, irrelevant. It is a fact that the capacity to conceive these forms leads to the construction of rooms like the present one; that is to say, the building of exterior spaces is a result of our possibility to conceive, thanks to our mental faculties, an ideal, speculative space. In addition to this, in this installation we find the reference to a higher space, one that is above the duality of the inner and outer spheres. This transcendent space is revealed by means of the vertical axis, the piled up cider crates, which, as the artist has stated, refer to the “axis mundi”, that mythical centre of the universe around which all things gyrate. Thus, starting off from concrete space (the installation), the viewer is led to transcendent space (the world’s axis) thanks to a faculty located in inner space (the capacity to conceive ideal forms). At the same time, this is possible because the three levels of space are inherently connected.
Innerness, outerness, the transcendent sphere… these are the axes around which Díaz de Rábago’s installations are constructed. One is thus shown an artist who does not reject “the spiritual in art” (Kandinsky), while at the same time not rejecting either the smile or ingenuity as important factors in the carrying out of his work. And so, his playful attitude transmits to us, when all is said and done, a humoristic wink that may perhaps be the most characteristic feature of his work.