About Marco Noris. Gesture, landscape
Do I portray the landscape for its beauty or for the absence of the human?
Do I need to rise, or is it only about not falling?
The more I suffer humanity, the more I enjoy nature, and the more I transcribe the invisible into a common language –I, translator of the unknown–, the more I can see in the human the flash of the infinite.(Marco Noris in a winter swept by the tramontana of summer)
In 2015 the mayor of a village in the east of the island of Tenerife had a blue line painted in the industrial estate shared by three different municipalities. The aim was to delimit how far the investment of municipal taxes would reach in its tasks of conserving, maintaining and cleaning strictly what was necessary, surgically extracting from the municipality’s public affairs that space of non-competence that the line marked beyond all logic of the common.
To paint a line in order to make politics. A border. We think of borders as the boundary of something, as the place where something ends, where something begins. Through which bodies move between one political space and another. Between one legality and another. A being-place without being-space, constructed in latitude and longitude, determining its position on the earth’s surface by apparently innocuous coordinates yet capable of affecting, by the simple advance of one foot to the other side, the subject who crosses them. The subject, geo-located between borders, is, in that non-space, a political entity, not an inhabitant, who, in the act of crossing that line, is presumed to have been notified of their change of status: as migrant, refugee, foreigner. Reaching port, entering or leaving the underworld or Eden, depending on the direction.
Marco Noris has profusely explored that place through very different actions: painting, video, walking. This is one of the stage-sets he has chosen, where his great themes occur. Borders, paths, shores, and summits, of which he records signals, stones, blocks and blank flags, in white, in black, pointing to something that could be there but does not appear. Lines defined by the absence of space, signified in their nothingness, turned into a two-dimensional image that conceals that disappearance by eliminating from what is represented –the void– the third of the observable physical dimensions.
It is in that non-space that Noris lets pictorial speculation unfold in all its force, illusion in all its power, of which Baudrillard speaks in The Conspiracy of Art: ‘Each image must take something away from the reality of the world: in each image something must disappear, (…) the disappearance must remain alive: that is the secret of art and of seduction.’
The illusionist character of those empty spaces in Noris’s work functions as an appeal to the sites of disappearance (the graves, the ditches, the extermination camps, but also despair, defeat, surrender), where the landscape ceases to be one in order to become a place of extinction. But beyond the prestidigitatory and strongly seductive force of his images, Noris notes, in recording the disappearance of a piece of the world’s image, the evidence of the trace of the human inscribed upon the earth-system. It is, in the end, our action –physical, political, emotional– upon the strata of delimitation of political and symbolic borders that creates non-spaces of suspension, in which nothing is ever what it had been just a step, an instant before. Noris’s work is this: the recording of the Anthropocene, as human and political time acting upon the landscape.
It is in this interval, located between the natural and the political, that Marco Noris’s projects are situated. In (Un)refuges, a set of paintings inspired by an old concentration camp in Joffre de Rivesaltes, in the south of France, which opened in the 1930s to house the Spanish exiles. Among pained portraits, faceless individuals, and landscapes with slabs, the project works on the uprooting and the despair that remain once the storm of tragedy has taken place. A work in which painting is the mode of access to that non-place occupied by the basements of the banished, and where oblivion grows among the dead.
The artist explains it in the text accompanying El triunfo de la derrota: “Mass graves, beaten rapists, accidents, waste and dumps; police victims, toppled effigies, fugitives and mutants… my work is a manual of collapse, a compendium of material and moral ruins.” In the manner of annotations, this project is a compendium of all that we tend to place in the spaces of suspension of history, where things cease to hurt because they are discarded. It is a catalogue of subjects gathered in order to extract them from oblivion so as to keep them present and at hand, in case they may be needed. To note them down, to evoke them, so that the horror does not return, Noris seems to think, knowing that it always returns. That is his working methodology here: dozens of small-format oil sketches that make up a compendium of human spectres and landscapes, among which some, in turn, will be recovered to be scaled up to larger formats.
But Noris does not hide the relevance of the dialogue between the large format (the main text) and the small-format sketches (the footnotes). The exhibition layout that could be seen in the solo show ‘It wasn’t the sun’ in 2017 at the Galeria Trama in Barcelona ran along these lines: to accompany the visitor through a narrative carefully articulated by references and to place them in the spot from which the artist constructs his narrative body. To fine-tune the content, to nuance the impressions, to evoke vestiges and give occasion to discourse.
Noris uses a hypertextual grammar. He has a deep knowledge of HTML programming (HyperText Markup Language), the basis of all web programming, which bases its development philosophy on the idea of reference: to add an external element (image, video, among others), it is not added to the page’s code; rather, a reference, a link, to the location of that element is included. In this way, the web page actually contains only text, while the task of joining all the elements and organising the final display of the page falls to the browser’s interface.
This is the exercise we saw Noris perform in the Trama exhibition. And it is the one we find in the studio, and also in the development of his intervention in Paratext nr7 at Hangar, where this relationship between a central body of work and its annotations unfolded as an open code of reading, to accompany us and facilitate access to the final content. In this performative action, he drew a complete map of (Un)refuges, drawing his research and creative process on the black walls of the space.
Noris explains it: “I opted for a performative format that would satisfy my needs for dissemination and at the same time allow me to create something I could consider a work in itself. (…) the live realisation of a mental map (…) that would explain the origins of the project, the references, the discoveries, the mistakes and the choices I had to make during its development. The use of different elements and languages (video, photo projection, objects, paintings, drawings, photographs, notes, letters, photocopies), joined together by arrows and texts written on the wall, allowed me to transfer a system of hypertextual content organisation into physical reality.”
Noris works in this way, from the tracing of mental maps that map the margins. As a tactic, hypertext is its immediate consequence. And the interface is the place where the shores cohabit, the contrivance between margins that connects person and history, human action with its trace on the landscape. An interface that presents itself as a lure with which to catch the viewer’s senses in order to seduce them, and which is at the same time an open trap in which the construction of intellectual discourse on the collapse of the human and the seductive emotion of disaster play together. It is the victory of defeat that captivates us in the project (Un)refuges, the sublimation of the vanquished, and the spectre of absence that emerges from the collapsed tombs of history1. And for all this, the choice of pictorial language is the medium that Noris considers most suitable for “handling the emotional without neglecting the intellectual”. The viewer’s familiarity with the visual code of painting is the manoeuvre he uses to capture them, activating the visual deception of what is represented, appealing to the projection of the dream of the real onto the canvas.
But the artist repeats to us that painting is no more than a strategy. And, as such, susceptible to being modified. And so, Noris ventures into other media with which to continue exploring at the limits. In his project En frontera, developed in the summer of 2017 within the framework of a research project on contemporary artistic production at the La Capella space in Barcelona, Noris maps the line of boundary markers of the Pyrenees. In search of how that non-place is constructed and how one dwells within it, Noris spent 25 days walking the entire Spanish-French border of the province of Girona, painting or noting each of the mugas that draw the boundary. In this project Noris does the inverse process to his earlier work: this time it was not a matter of painting the traces of history upon the human, nor of the human upon nature, but of experiencing the landscape in the body, of letting it leave its mark on the flesh. And of telling it.
The result of the crossing is again a narrative ensemble made of necessary pieces: sketches, short texts, photographs, drawings and oils in which discipline prevails (reaching each goal, producing the daily document) over immediate results. It is not the stroller’s pleasure that is recorded; it is the worker’s mourning, the walker’s tiredness, and the observer’s impression. And also the physical journey towards the limits of each of these emotional and rational states.
The project takes its final form in a carefully crafted publication in which each chosen format and each register (the historical and geographical data, the crossing, the description and the very reflection on the nature of the project and of art) finds a place. And it is again in the interweaving of those narrative layers that the entire project takes on meaning: walking is, in the end, related to telling stories.
While En frontera followed a predetermined trace and a previously calculated path, La Entrega, in which he is now engaged, maintains the format –walking– but changes the initial question: it is no longer a matter of mapping the trail markers, but of recording on prepared yet empty documents (papers of different sizes folded like maps) the trace of the body in movement, of the thought that accompanies it and the context given along the way. This time the challenge is the blank document, the maps to be made towards the summit. Perhaps he is also accompanied by questions about the condition of the production of artistic work, of success and failure, of its meaning and its relationship with an environment that is not always habitable. With a single decision taken in advance, that of the final destination, the objective is the delivery of those records taken during the journey between Barcelona and Farrera, one of the highest villages in the Lleida Pyrenees2.
Marco Noris has worked on borders, refugees, absences and presences, the disappeared, the empty spaces in the landscape; on the path, in the path, and in the in-between place where everything remains suspended between possible triumph and certain defeat. Not content with the results found, however effective they may be in their capacity for evocation, in the quality of manual, pictorial, documentary work…, Noris begins each process with a question that emerges from the previous process. Without getting trapped in style or formats, he advances through the practices of art, inviting whoever looks at him to let themselves be crossed by images that ask about poetics and about politics. Without cornering us. Although one might think that he leads us to places with no room for manoeuvre, Marco Noris always works by opening an interstice through which slips the condition of possibility that something that has happened may emerge, or that something yet to happen may light up the horizon. So that, from that crack, the most fragile instants of the human condition may emerge.
Tere Badia, 2018