#19:

On the Work of Jovencio de la Paz
​by Benjamin Terrell

Courtesy of the artist and Chris Sharp Gallery

Nianfo - An Invocation

Blue Buddha, Moon Buddha, Gee's Bend Buddha,  Marcel Duchamp Bottle Rack Buddha, Kara Walker cut out Buddha, The Red Balloon Buddha, Amida blessing Buddha, El Anatsui Buddha, Wolfgang Laib beeswax Buddha, A bamboo broom Buddha that sweeps away everything except the shimmery bits of stardust. May a cosmic comet snuff out the self, long before we are lost in the silt and the small knowledge of this world. I can only truly know you Buddha from my most ignorant places, my ship shorn from shores of sameness. May the continuous current carry us all into the slow churning dark water of what is unknowable.

Detail of a work in progress.
​Courtesy of the artist and Chris Sharp Gallery

Red sun summer felt like late-stage earth or at least the earth of my later stages. But what has calendar time done for the great persistent mysteries? It is the flame that heats the kettle of our earthly urgency. Urgency in turn forges our reluctance into a container substantial enough for belief to be poured in. Everything in this lifetime is at its essence either praise or pain, flower or flame. Flame like flower needs some tether to the earth in order to bloom. We too are woven together, tethered by our interdependence, a reliance represented in every artistic interpretation of pattern. Pattern is the drone note of our existence, and like drone's role in Indian devotional music, it is the first and last note connecting every attempt of ours to play creation back to its creator.

Courtesy of the artist and Chris Sharp Gallery

All art is a love letter to what we must leave behind. Every pattern produced can be seen as an inextinguishable longing, an unbroken ancestral desire to be in the world. Let me tell you what the motif that made me said before we parted, "My son, let us meet again somewhere, sometime." All motifs yearn to see themselves repeated but as with waves against a breaker, repetition also leads to disintegration. Additionally, repetition can increase belief and even lead to a reversal of order of what is repeated.

Art is eternal once it is expressed, and it lives long past the fraying of the fabric of our lineages. Only technology is forgotten but perhaps even into the pattern and program of software melancholy may seep between circuits.  Famously spoken by an AI "replicant" in the original Blade Runner movie: "All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain...."

To create with both loom and computer is comparable to boarding horses onto a bullet train, saturating scarce ultramarine pigment into data's densest pixel or, like asking the reluctant yet pattern producing mind to cooperate with the eager unadorned heart. Artists using ancient and newer technology emulate our psyche's longing to deprogram the thinking and feeling self, so as to set out on a middle path of liberation. At our core we are The Watcher and like the loom we are tools capable of transformation. Ego and our surface world, like the computer, is the child that grew dangerous during its infancy. To use tools from the beginning and the end of the industrial revolution may be like painting on the walls of caves we won't live to exit; into worlds we couldn't fully comprehend.

Detail of a work in progress.
Courtesy of the artist and Chris Sharp Gallery

Warped Grid 3.2
​ 2023. Hand-woven, Jacquard textiles and cotton, 
44 x 42 x 1 1/2 in (111.8 x 106.7 x 3.8 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Chris Sharp Gallery

​In a work by Jovencio de la Paz, the places where transformation is most visible are often the areas where the artist has asked a computer to go beyond its program and fix, fill in or (has been set up to) fail. One may wonder, are these glitches the computer at its most human? As if faced with folly, chance or adversity, a creative digital improvisation results in a kind of algorithm and blues. Perhaps the artist inverts the principles of the sand mandala (slow to build, quick to erase) by making efficient artifacts with computer wounds that once hung have eternity to dismantle. Or imagine the art is in the action, in presence of artist and loom the computer is coaxed beyond itself to circumambulate the studio into the textile, a metamorphosis similar to man becoming deity in the Hindu ritual of Theyyam.

The big one and the little one 2.1
2023. Hand-woven, Jacquard textiles and cotton,
58 x 58 x 1 1/2 in (147.3 x 147.3 x 3.8 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Chris Sharp Gallery

Imagination itself lies beyond a mind's ability to measure distance or time- picture a computer freed from its device, like a human essence absent of ego. Defaulting beyond the material to something spiraling outward toward the infinite, the digital distillation now free sees itself in the womb of the loom, emerging through the pinhole of a Jacquard punch card. It sees itself as the Calculating Engine computer, the Difference Engine computer, the Analytical Engine computer, as a computer that eventually replaces the hand that holds, clings and relies on devices, as a computer that displaces the horse and eventually also becomes the rider. This "machine in the ghost" is illumined and active in the work of De la Paz as a phantom flip capable of both giving and taking away.  "One ghost succeeds the other like waves on the illusory sea of birth and death," writes Benjamin Labatut. "In every creature sleeps an infinite intelligence... destined to awaken... and conquer time and space." ​

Warped Grid 3.0
2023. Hand-woven, Jacquard textiles and cotton,
52 x 57 x 1 1/2 in (132.1 x 144.8 x 3.8 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Chris Sharp Gallery

A weaving by Jovencio de la Paz can feel like a technological graphite shroud, a digital grave rubbing, even appear as a cyber-skin made to cover/encase in anticipation of what currently electronically emerges into our conscious world faster than we can comprehend. (The numbers are the body of the fog.)

A weaving by de la Paz is seen on the wall, the floor and on a table, (Ghost in the maze).  The utility of each placement a nod to fluctuating necessity,  purpose and perception. Ground granting mystery and connectivity (earth/body), a tabletop a topography for sustenance (consumption/community) and wall as a disruption or confrontation of ego and mind (self/worldliness).

Weave Draft Aberrations are three short black and white videos of pulsating pattern emerging and subtracting like Philip Glass feathers found and lost dissolving in digital fountains. As if computer and loom were found in synchronized dreaming, weaving together continuous and intermittent flickering frequencies. As if something for the ears has been co-opted for the pleasure of the eye, like the sound-bath visually imagined. As if an improvisation of "noise colors" was performed without audio, featuring the full spectrum- white noise, pink noise, brown noise, blue noise, gray noise, green, orange and black. Here technology and tradition are not opposed, they are conductor and contralto in silent symphonies.

Courtesy of the artist and Chris Sharp Gallery

The artist's Warped Grid series are both flag and fractal fluctuating between disorder and order. Triangles and squares vie for liberation from partial pattern as to advocate for "delight" as the line dividing understanding and what can't be known. Pattern seen both repeated and incomplete asks the eye to find cadence in chaos and to discard tradition in favor of discovery. Conversation about textile (and other art born of utility) is often constricted to the creativity of necessity. But to speak of or seek only function as explanation is to ignore how the artist confronts mystery. De la Paz's work is as much an articulation of earthly experience as it is an offering to the eternal unknown and therefore, the ultimate placeholder for paradox.

A textile can exemplify the epidermis of embodiment, but it is also a capable shroud for mourning the field that floods when we are over identified with the fleetingness of this form. Melancholy blossoms in human temporality and as a result we are given access to the sublime. The work of Jovencio de la Paz is like a treaty of two worlds, time lost and time eternal, like new fruit from fragile and forgotten orchards. "Persian flaw" is a single irregularity sewn into carpets as acknowledgment that only the creator of all things can achieve perfection. The imperfection sewn into our human experience is the paradox of perception- loss leading to meaning and meaning leading us back what we must lose. Like the perpetual tuning of tradition and technology, always ending and beginning- they are not opposed, they are like lovers. They speak to each other like the lover speaks to the other, Give me independence and loving fidelity in my reproduction and together we will be noble ghosts in this gilded mansion.

You can see more of Jovencio de la Paz's work...

     - at Chris Sharp Gallery

     - on Jovencio de la Paz's website
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     - on these weave draft aberration videos: 
        https://vimeo.com/284972363

        https://vimeo.com/284971023

        https://vimeo.com/282582535

     - on instagram: @jovenciodelapaz
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