TEN CAUSTIC WORKS ON PAPER

Ten sheets of black paper, drawn with sodium hypochlorite — household bleach, put down with brush, dropper and bare hand. The bleach lifts the dye out of the paper, so every mark arrives pale: gold, cream, sometimes grey. Nothing is added. The image is what the paper gives up. There is no undo. A line keeps spreading after the hand has left, so the drawing finishes itself. He found the method by spilling chlorine on work he assumed was ruined. A palm pressed flat blooms outward into fern-shaped tendrils. A poured field eats the sheet down to cream. The largest is 139 by 100 centimetres. Most were kept folded, and the folds stayed in them. The archive already holds the caustic practice as a body, and the folded books it produced. This node is the ten he titled and measured himself. Which sheet carries which title is mostly unrecorded, and this node does not pretend otherwise. The ten, all sodium hypochlorite on paper: VIS (Dream) — 2019 — 139 × 100 cm A FOST DEMULT (It Was Long Ago) — 2019 — 50 × 65 cm FLASH — 2018 — 50 × 65 cm EVERYTHING CAN — 2018 — 130 × 100 cm I DREAMED — 2018 — 130 × 100 cm DECONSTRUCTION OF AN ENTITY — 2019 — 50 × 65 cm 265 SEQUENCES — 2019 — 50 × 65 cm INTÂMPINARE (Welcoming) — 2019 — 65 × 50 cm ATINGERE (Touch) — 2018 — 65 × 50 cm PRIMAL BOOK — 2017 — 50 × 65 cm 265 SEQUENCES now has its own page in the archive, split out of this group because its wall label at Espronceda dated and measured it beyond doubt. The other nine stay here until each one can be matched to its photograph with the same certainty. At least one of the ten went to Espronceda in November 2020 and hung framed: 265 SEQUENCES, on the white wall with its own label — 2019, sodium hypochlorite on paper, 50 × 65 cm. That label is where the archive got the medium wording right for the whole caustic family.