Aching sphere. Instead of other thing. The everything. Abstraction.

Instead of other thing.
Semiotics on extremes.

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This photo shows a small sphere of aluminum with de letters AU engraved on its surface.

CVA (Juan Luis Moraza,
María Luisa Fernández): "AU", 1984.
Image source: ARTIUM.

Aching sphere: “AU”, Juan Luis Moraza, María Luisa Fernández, 1984.

Here we have a sphere. To be exact, a hollow aluminum sphere of twenty centimeters diameter. Full of painting oil, if we believe the information that is attached (and we ought to believe it). A sealed sphere on whose surface we can observe a couple of letters.

There is an enormous semantical field associable to this geometrical surface. A cultural unity based on the fact that no other area bring with it the formal requirements needed to implement this representation. Sphere: the best possible diagram, the unique in fact, to represent the identity of all points of a surface. Diagram and, therefore, icon, of the equal-belonging relations. Therefore, the perfect symbol of belonging to being, that the philosopher and semiotician Charles S. Pierce characterized as "unlimited extension, null intension."

At the sublime symbol (which is based on the icon), "discreet receptacle of the immensity" in the words of Peter Sloterdij, these two artists add a couple of graphic traces, two phonetic symbols of our linguistical area, the uppercase letters A and U of the Roman alphabet, the first and the last vowels.

This "AU" inevitably sounds to an interjection of complaint, to that other "AU" that is spontaneously uttered when one is stepped on to his feet, or when one is stumbled upon a bollard (... a spherical one, of course). Perhaps the piece is resolved, then, in a small prank, a sympathetic joke to the cohort of serious metaphysicians, worshipers wises of the supreme symbol who are represented in the mosaic of Torre Annunziata. So, being to what I belong, it produces me a complaint, not even a nausea (like to the existentialists).

Mosaic of Torre Annunciata

We knew metaphysical meditation caused melancholy (or conversely, that depression could induce philosophy), as illustrated by the famous Dürer's engraving. But here it is suggested a rather mild pain and a short cry, the resigned acceptance of what we can not, we do not want to opposse resistance.

Melancholy, an engraving by Albert Durer.

AU is also the short for Aurum, is to say Gold, used in chemical notation as its symbol. In this way, CVA marked as gold the supreme frame that the sphere is, or perhaps just its content, the painting oil, which is potentially all the paint, which can represent to everything (at least to everything which was representable).

Rubén Díaz de Corcuera.
Abstraction / The everything.
February 28, 2010.