Writer, dealer in ideas and director of KRTU
(Culture, Research, Technology, Universal)
I have learned from the ancient books, our classics, that images inhabit space. Under a figuration that is not at all phantasmagoric, where the real and the mythical live in a carnal celestial union, the images, the signs and the word appear to us in the skin of the universe. Objects and words are supported by the earth, fallen, subject to the physical laws of weight and gravitation. But like everything human with its impulse to transcendence, they rise. There is an animated life in this dead matter. The great religious systems have written an extraordinary literature about these things; and science has managed, without losing its capacity for metaphor, to deny simulacrums. It was precisely with this name of Asimulacrum that the rising images were known.
Humans seem to swallow the words which re-emerge through the music box formed by the breath and the vocal cords while the images are extracted from space exclusively by artists who form them by technique. The history of images is explained by technique, as is literature. In an extreme case we would dare to affirm that technique is metaphysics.
The first images transported from space were painted with earthly matter and human matter. On the contrary, the latest images are transported from the earth to mental space. The first great process was that of materialization and codification; the last, begun a short time ago, is a progressive process of dematerialization. The stronger the technique – from the real to the virtual, from the artisanal to the digital – the more we join the macro and the micro. We know more about the past the more we know about the future. Technique is the present towards the future.
From the fragile clay tablets to the portable canvases, from the parchments to the printed papers, the support on which artists have kept their stolen images has also been progressively expansive. Even the images and texts that escape from the screens travel through space. Today there are more images traveling through light than are stored in all the museums of the world. There are so many that the world of art is opaque and that of writing is noisy.
In the village of Cadaqués, thanks to the impulsive tramuntana wind that transports the images out to sea, one can still clearly see traces of the stolen images, also called simulacrums, in their three states: mineral, artificial and multiple. We only have to make an excursion to the secret coves to observe at first sight the prodigious work of the wind and the sea to engrave on the hard stone the fossil traces of abstract almost figurative images. The Baroque retable full of blowing angels who transported biblical narrations from the high sea to the interior of the church is one of the best examples of the period of artifice. And in a half hidden alley arises an enormous 24 year old bougainvillea whose expired flowers are imprinted with small format images that come from all over the world and are renewed year after year: the Mini Print International of Cadaqués.
Mercedes Barberà Rusiñol
President of ADOGI
All possible printmaking techniques are represented in the Miniprint exhibition of 2004. The continual increase in the number of visitors with their positive considerations is helping to make it known around the world.
The individual exhibitions of the previous year’s prizewinners are a great inducement to visit the Taller Galeria Fort of Cadaqués. The artists’ presence at the openings of their solo shows fills us with satisfaction because of the interest they demonstrate by traveling from their countries and for the interchange of ideas, knowledge and sympathy that it represents.
This year we were visited by the following artists who also acted as jurors: Ase Anda of Norway who resided here with his family for several days; Masaaki Ohya from Japan who told us about the resonance that the Mini Print International of Cadaquès has in his country and who promised to be its best ambassador; Micheline Doucet-Carriere of France who was very enthusiastic about the show and offered her congratulations; Berko from Slovenia who showed us the many possibilities of serigraphy; Gloria Santacruz Trajuelo of Spain who could not join us because she was expecting the birth of her daughter Inés who has now arrived full of health and joy.
All the solo shows were much admired and visited. During the months of July, August and September the Mini Print International of Cadaqués was exhibited in the “Wingfield Arts Festival” in England. As always, the British public looks forward to this exhibition and through the years has visited it with enormous interest. I am grateful to the organizers for their effort and dedication.
From December through the middle of January the exhibition is received by the gallery “L'Étangd'Art”, in Bages, France. Thanks to the enthusiasm of Sophie Cassard and the various media that publicize it, the Mini Print has become a major event in the south of France.
All my gratitude to the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports of the Spanish government whose generous subsidy has made possible the complete edition of this catalog, and to the General Direction of Promotion and Cultural Cooperation of the Generalitat de Catalunya whose economic aid has contributed to publicizing this event throughout the world.
As always we are grateful for the amiable participation of printmaking artists from around the world who, year after year make possible, with their works, the implementation of the much admired exhibition of the Mini Print International of Cadaqués.
The next exhibition will be number twenty-five. We think it is a remarkable date and we are counting on the participation of all those artists who believe that the Mini Print deserves to continue for many more years. We wish this to be so.