Dos lenguajes (Two languages). Workshop with Elena Asins
Fragments of memory, the Elena Asins exhibition taking place from 15 June to 31 October of 2011 brings together, in the words of the artist, snippets of the signs that have taken shape over a lifetime (…), examples of a creative, disciplined and rigorous state of mind” . Although ignored for a long time, the work of Elena Asins (Madrid, 1940) goes beyond the notions of geometric, normative, neoconcrete, minimalist and even conceptual abstraction and reveals quite the opposite, a counter current oeuvre based on the manifestation of the logic of thought.
Asins represents a paradigm change that occurred in Spanish art starting in 1960, in which the expression of the painter's subjectivity, a characteristic of the informalisms and expressionisms dominating at the time, gives way to a vindication of process and language as an analysis of the mechanisms of signification. In its apparent simplicity and rigour, the work of Asins shows a discursive complexity in which information theory, semiotics, structuralism, mathematics and generative grammar form a category of the time and the experience of art activity.
This workshop unravels, with the help of the artist, such investigations, in an attempt to understand works through what they show and also through their silences and emptiness. Comprised of a guided visit to the exhibition, with commentary by the artist, followed by a colloquium with the audience, it seeks to articulate both languages, that of the visible and that of the verbal, that of the artist and that of the audience or that of the exhibition and that of debate, as keys to understanding Elena Asins' work.