SELF EDITIONS

We create and distribute our own publishing projects with well-renowned local and international artists through collections. You can purchase items from our collection of publications by one-off payment or by payment in instalments.

TINTA INVISIBLE: An expanded phenomenology of printmaking .

Working with intaglio and other different contemporary printmaking techniques, Tinta Invisible, over the last twenty-five years, have explored the multiple, elastic formulations and formats possible within a genre that oscillates between the artist’s book, the unique print, and a collective project. There is no sole term that begins to encompass what this workshop produces and helps to conceive, like a midwife, in total complicity with the artists. Let’s try to imagine, first, a work of art that is not intended to be enshrined on the wall in an exhibition space, yet doesn’t renounce, quite the contrary, the most sophisticated formal resolution, the most suggestive visual play and the most subtle idea. Let us imagine, above all, that it is produced with discretion and solvency, without pedantry or any desire to monumentalise or impose, casting aside the narcissism of the frame and the plinth, as well as the iconographic superficiality of the age of social networks. Tinta Invisible makes images, leaves traces, in a more astute, modest, and intelligent way.

                         Working with artists, Tinta Invisible fabricates images, yes, but these are images that can be touched, stored, or displayed, that act alone or collectively, that are activated and reveal in relation to each other, unfurling and opening up. The print and the artist’s book have their own phenomenology, they invite specific experiences of reception. As opposed to a conventional work that demands admiration and respect from the distance of the exhibition format – or in the promiscuity of the public space–, these other works of art lead us to a transgression that is practiced discretely. They are a form of artistic device designed to be contemplated in private – although not necessarily individually. They do not submit to the indifference of the public space, nor to the multitudinous, purist singularity of the piece in the museum. This is not an auratic art, but it is precious. Looking, reading, and touching are found in balanced proportion. To enjoy them calls for a certain ritual, that we ourselves can establish. The painting, on the wall, becomes invisible and observes us – we have seen it in so many suspense laden cartoons. Printmaking, on the other hand, belongs to the orbit of paper, to the book, to the cabinet. It is revealed through delicate contact. When it is conserved within a box, it must be opened and set up. We might have to choose which work we will bring to light, so that it accompanies us for a while. We can meditate upon which pieces we want to contemplate and in what order. We will never do it negligently. We will have to manipulate, observe, and perhaps even smell. We won’t act as in private views: distracted little groups won’t pass by the work, cava in hand. We will practice silence or converse while we open, unfold, and brush it with our fingers. It is a no to snobbism and a yes to confidentiality, to intimacy, respect, and an attention that enriches.

                         Artists have known how to take advantage of all these conditions and this loving precision of technique and detail. Guinovart was the first to open the fount of sensuality, the technical extravagance, the delicious materiality of printmaking. Antoni Llena challenged the printers asking for a register of the slime trails of snails: an impossible alchemy to capture a random and almost invisible trace. Ignasi Aballí creates a chromatic paradox with the glass of the frame that transforms the perception of the image. Pedro G. Romero activates the metaphorical power of black to consider an ontology. Joan Fontcuberta explores the ambivalence between the stain and memory, with an archaeology of the image. Josep Maria Mestres Quadreny reveals his scores as fascinating labyrinths. Carlos Bunga converts a boxed pile of paper into a sort of inverted, bottomless ziggurat.

                         Tinta Invisible articulates all these contributions and compiles them into series, editions, and boxes. Inventing portfolios and containers, exhibition stands and structures to contain and protect, that invite discovery and wonder. Their inventiveness is absolute, and it’s hard no to think of the illustrious precedent of Joseph Cornell and his poetic boxes, that Marcel Duchamp converted into his essential Boîtes-en-valise that contained a whole range of artistic registers, that not only treasured but also created a narrative, defining the whole of Duchamp’s work.

                         Undoubtedly, the collective and enthusiastic spirit of the team at Tinta Invisible is the key to the success of their tutelage –they are curators, without a doubt–along with the complicity of writers and poets. The artists find assistance and encouragement there, solutions and questions. The result is a catalogue of images-books-objects that brings together many of the most interesting and representative expressions of Catalan art from the last few years. They configure a voluptuous and secret library, precise and overflowing, domestic and dynamic, that for now seems inexhaustible.


Àlex Mitrani