FINIS TERRA: A fractured landscape. Héctor Calderón Bozzi

WHEN THE EARTH WAS FLAT
Remains of an ancient site, vestiges of a lost civilisation, tesserae of an unfinished mosaic?
Those who have followed Héctor Calderón Bozzi’s career know that every step he takes and every result he produces has a long and complex meditation, so that when an idea of his becomes a word, makes its way into space, becomes colour, one knows that to get there it has had to go through a refined process of elaboration. And now, with ‘Finis Terra. Un paisaje fracturado’ (Finis Terra. A fractured landscape), confirms the above statement once again. So, in order to be able to contemplate the present exhibition, these tiles had to go through a rough journey, they had to undergo a long – and sometimes tortuous – process of transformation before they finally saw the light of day. All that previous effort was worth it, and in view of the results, it can be stated that this exhibition will undoubtedly mark a before and after in his artistic career.

Cartographic debris? Cosmic nuismatics?
Tectonic plates? Bases of a tetrahedron?
If in his previous exhibition, ‘Los vestigios’, we saw a series of abstract paintings with the horizon line as a common denominator, now Héctor Calderón changes the support and the technique, but his purpose remains intact and he takes us by the hand along that same dividing line to see what lies beyond that flat earth, to see what is hidden at the end of his particular Finisterre.

Forgotten paintings by Paul Klee? Chessboard squares?
Traces of a volcanic eruption?
It seems that his work was aimed at establishing a dialogue with abstraction. And in this exhibition he confirms that this is his favourite territory. And the results are obvious: on a single plate one can find an endless number of forms, colours and textures that multiply and fit together mysteriously, where everything that is seen has the imminence of origin, indeed, where everything is about to signify, as if the artist were showing us a territory where signs are in the process of being formed. And so that the spectator has greater interpretative freedom, the names of the tiles have been deliberately suppressed so that it is only a number that names them, which in turn causes the audience to be witnesses and creators of what is happening before their eyes.

Pulverised prisms? defunct orographies?
Friction of frontiers?
Moving away from the technique of the Japanese Raku, his explorer spirit asks him to take a risk and leap into the void, unaware of what lies beyond that horizon, where, as Strabo said, at sunset one hears the screeching of the sun on contact with the sea. And that line of the horizon that has been one of his constants now appears as a crack, as a scar that speaks to us of the uncertain, of the unnamable, of birth but also of destruction, of what cannot be said, as if on these plates the babbling of matter could be heard, as if it were the tablet on which the dawn of language is written.

Calcined syllables? Maremagnum?
Cuneiform tablets? Galactic dust?
The certainly alchemical process to which the tiles are subjected produces results that are beyond the artist’s control. And that is exactly what it is all about: letting nature itself speak for itself, without human intervention. So that when we observe them, in their delimited world of right angles and their silent exclamation, we feel we are in front of a strange deposit extracted from the depths of the earth, or many metres down to the bottom of the sea. When you see them, you have the sensation that these tiles were fragments rescued from a remote mosaic in a desert, or that they have retained the humidity of the sea depths. And that they were timidly approaching the light for the first time, after being hidden for centuries.

Fragments of a Borgesian Aleph?
Visions of Patinir’s Charon?
Iron and cobalt, copper and bismuth, tin and silver are the elements chosen by the artist to fight their particular battle at over 900 degrees in a furnace that takes several hours to reach its temperature, making their combinations totally different from one another, verging on that sensation of the infinite, of the unhinged, of the ungovernable. ‘Nothing more precise than a chemical reaction and nothing more unpredictable than its result’, says the artist. But by provoking chance, Héctor Calderón wants to underline the importance of the fissure as an eloquent element of the beginning of doubt and also of the end of certainty, or also of the irruption of the indeterminate.

Enigma perimeters? Vithrales without a garden?
Blue in search of its lapis lazuli? Imaginary geology?
What the artist could never create, he leaves in the hands of nature itself so that it in turn becomes the subject of his construction. Hence the unexpected, certainly magical, force that gives the tiles their particular magnetism. Close to Land Art but at the same time situated miles away from Rakú, Héctor Calderón goes a step beyond the installation in space or the ceremonial vessel where, thanks to the accident, the involuntary, and the chosen elements, the stony and the liquid coexist, where textures become vibrations that exalt the material and manage to expand the frontiers of the physical horizon.

Burnt remains? Confluence of the Humboldt Current?
Premonitions in the Rías Baixas?
Because we are at the end of the earth, in the territories of the improbable, Héctor lets the new express itself and we advance into the unknown, not without first feeling that there is a hidden claim for the destruction to which we have subjected nature, but also so that we repeat, looking at the solitary tiles, those verses of Rumi: So that with its light/ I can turn my dark stones into gold.

Petrified roots? Stopped combustions?
Whirling dervishes?
The original idea and the randomness of the result. This is why the artist ceases to be an artist, to consider himself as just another agent in the transformation of the elements, since temperature, sawdust, atmospheric humidity intervene as modifiers in the production of the tiles. And it is certainly paradoxical that the silvery sheen of some of them should have been produced in the castle of Oropesa where Francisco Álvarez de Toledo, Viceroy of Peru, brought the silver extracted from the mines of America. But this is not a historical vindication, much less a settling of scores five hundred years later. It is about pointing out what is permanent and touching what is changeable, about entering history and glimpsing the future, about noticing the destruction of nature and glimpsing the construction of a new geology, about the tide standing still and the mystery in movement, about what Héctor wants us to see of his Finisterre.

Secret codes? Astral chords?
Herodotus’ dreams? Talismanic stones?
Let us hope that this search by Héctor Calderón is only the beginning of a long road ahead, so that he can continue to share with us his discoveries in that shifting frontier where there is no room for certainty, where everything becomes a revelation.

RAMÓN COTE BARAIBAR

FINIS TERRA PROJECT
a fractured landscape

This project is the continuation and synthesis of a series widely experimented in recent years, in workshops in Barichara, Colombia and Miraflores de la Sierra and Villanueva de La Vera, Spain, by a group of ceramists such as Jaime Villa, Mar Alberruche and César Rivas, in coordination with the Colombian architect and painter living in Spain, Héctor Calderón Bozzi.

As its name indicates, it alludes to the place where ‘the land ends’ in Galicia, but also to the quintessence of that line of the horizon as an almost abstract expression of the landscape. It is partly related to the ‘terraplanist’ vision of 16th century Spain, synthesised in the symbolism of Finisterre as the edge of the flat world and the application of that vision to the processes of conquest and colony, and is intended to refer to an arc that reaches the present day, where the disregard for the natural environment has left an indelible and irreversible fracture in the landscape. It also alludes to the geological processes of formation and configuration of phenomena, as a delicate balance that is situated in the origins of life, as if it were an alchemy that represents these complex and fragile evolutions.

Technically, it is a painting based on emulsions made from metal oxide pigments (copper, iron, cobalt, titanium, tin, bis-muto and silver) applied to flat ceramic plates and subjected to a process similar to the ancient Japanese technique of Raku, in which the oxide is reduced (to different degrees and in different ways) by burning and suffocating at high temperature in beds of wood and sawdust.

Incidentally, the silver nitrate, which is the pictorial and symbolic thread of the series, is the same substance as the support of the black and white analogue photograph, which has a specific and specific meaning and effect. The project, of a markedly experimental nature, has been endorsed by different galleries and cultural circles and will initially be exhibited at the Galería Nueva Las Letras in Madrid next November.

It consists of 36 assemblages of 105 tiles of 30×30 cm and 15×15 cm, almost all of them handmade especially for this purpose and in different formats, in a pictorial-sculptural language that includes cracking, fissures, cracks and fractures.

It will be in production during the spring and summer of 2024, and initially exhibiting in the autumn of the same year.

HCB