September 22nd to October 22nd, 2022
TRAU is a photographic-poetic project by Carles Mercader, Vicenç Altaió and Lluís Calvo. This edition is formalized in an artist's book that contains a portable exhibition with 7 photographs and a silkscreen printed sheet.
Double flesh of crazed absence
We are all the mask: fictitious approach with eyes like rubies and lips curled into a grimace. Let’s stop here. One day I learned that the body was a mineral glow, an absolute impossibility. That’s the way of it: the body is always someone else, and mine is just the realisation of a boundary, a limit, an aberration that marks the outside and the inside. The body becomes alien because it is the spirit that clothes it. You can change the body and be a prêt-à-porter puppet oh sweetest queer, and you can think, of course, that bile, blood and fluids are a microcosm. But beyond this temple reflected in the other in the truly great, in the entire universe, you will only find rubble and shattered remains. Artaud: “When you will have made him a body without organs, then you will have restored him to his true freedom”. Noli me tangere. If you did, if you touched me, you would find that it is all a lie wrapped in cellophane of half-truths. There is nothing on the other side and when the body is possessed all you are left with is a void in your hands, or a ray of sperm that engenders statues you will never be able to erect.
The brothel is the museum of the absent, of phantasmagorical bodies attracted and repelled since the beginning of time. Mask upon mask. Pornography inhabits a black hole. Excrescence and fury of the impossible. You move your finger closer, like God does to Adam in the Sistine Chapel. If everything was as simple as that finger, like this shaft, like these vaginal lips! No: the body is distance because it occupies a space, because it is there. Only on the white screen is freedom obtained. Outwith the bodies there is space: empty, without attributes or features. Like Odysseus, we all call ourselves Nobody.
Clown, witch, the one who makes fun of others. Here is the etymology of the mask and the masked one. Prosopon and persona: the one who bears the mask. The vizard is a carnivalesque repetition on a face that becomes a bust. Who can withstand the presence of a statue in front of them? What conversation and what touch, then? What brushing of silk if the canvas is Stone and the stone is the contour of a knot in the heart?
Like the red ant that excavates the trunk and takes refuge in mourning, the tickle of water as it runs down the visage, poison clouded by mist and spray, blinded sauria, song of the goldfinch obstructed by whispering. We had the body and wasted it seeking our image amidst its debris. To be you on the other side of the mirror, to look at you and know nothing more of my face. To learn that all misfortunes bear the name of a grimace, a scabrous endeavour to recoup that which is no longer there, one who has lost their name and stammers in the nests of childhood, the one who was me to you and who you made absent, because you were my double skin. And yes, just by tearing it away, the poison appears: the other mourns, nothing.
Lluís Calvo
