EN - Britto Jinorio, Orlando: Dear friend Eberhard, Book Bosslet – Works in Spain, Extraverlag, Berlin, 2014
Dear friend Eberhard :
It is always a joy to hear from you. I have to tell you that I delightedly accept your proposal to write a text for the book you wish to edit and summarise such immense and fantastic artwork which you have done in the last thirty years.
It is not the first time I have decided to tackle a text on the work of an artist in the way of an epistolary genre. I beg your pardon for my forwardness. I feel more comfortable in this environment and it allows me to maintain closeness, warmth and respect of a friendship built from the shared passion for art and all its possible areas of action.
I think you know me well and know that for a few years I take my texts into account from a perspective where I want to show the aspects form a human point of view, which I believe are revealing, and I have been able to discover or share with artists with whom I have been fortunate to build projects with over the years.
The edition of your retrospective book which you are preparing, with a comprehensive collection of texts, images and projects will be, without a doubt, a wonderful tool and clarifying the true enormity of your work, a piece of related work which is emotionally linked to a very substantial part of your time and life to the geography of the Canary Islands. Ever since your first visit to the islands in 1981 to the present day which is nicely narrated by you it the artistic autobiography in this book; an artistic project which is in a continuous relationship with the archipelago, a "place of places" key on your personal emotional mapping.
In one of the paragraphs of, in my opinion, your essential autobiographical text, which you speak about when there is a moment to feel that you are really affected by a lucky "insular virus".
What starts off as an initiated journey for you at the beginning of the eighties, the long journey of an outstanding German art student in his post grads, a young artist that photographed and looks in a different way at the elements of the rural and urban landscape of these islands; and who was occasionally returned and spent time on a global project where art and life came together, giving it such a particular shape as well as deep, necessary and complementary, insular reflection. The source and unconscious insular condition of that young student from Berlin, coming from the great city-island and metropolis, Berlin, starts to flower, in the beginning of those years during those first encounters with those strange as well as fantastic geographies "destroyed" by the insular Canarian man.
But for this to happen, for this encounter to be produced and development of a singular and coherent piece of work that has been around for more than thirty years, in a really amazing scale of work, and from a perspective of planning and multiple artistic execution and interdisciplinary, of numerous registers, where the ephemera action is integrated in the landscape to then subtly and poetically disappear in time, and only preserved in photographic documents. For this to happen, I insist, a series of circumstances of a formative and discursive character, they had previously come together in that young central-European artist that came to that beautiful yet disconcerting, and on occasions shocking, " built-up landscape" of "The garden of Hespérides"
At the start of the eighties you went to Berlin, my dear Eberhard, and founding member of the artist collective known as "Material und Wirkung e. V". Of which I am totally sure that with your fundamental manner in the writing of the manifest or trust act of the fore mentioned. Very few times have I had the opportunity to read a manifest of an artist that is so clearly and coherently materialising in the development throughout the trajectory and artistic career. Convictions of youth and an enormous maturity that evolves and transforms with the passing of time within the script that maintains an argumentative line which is as solid as it is open.
Since I read the first words and advanced in the text I could not stop from repeating through very quickly the hundred or so images of your projects that you have been practically sending me for the twenty years we have known each other and through your publications, compact discs you sent or most recently your website.
The Trust act or Manifest of your group explained it like this:
"The materials and their effects will be investigated through the viewpoints and emotional methods of procedure, functional, intuitive, discursive, and culturally random. Attention will be paid to the results, states and forms of investigation, processes, products and situations and these facts will be documented.
Everything, substances, living creatures, relationships systems and structures in open spaces, artificial economical, scientific, social and cultural will be considered "Materials".
Any rational quality, perception or experience produced by the materials or those that take us to them will be considered "Effect"."
Without a doubt I invite from now on the reader of this retrospective book and the future public that can see and participate in your expositions, or visit "in situ" your interventions, which this manifest takes, as if it were a visitor's card, in you pocket, wallet or purse, and as an exercise, firstly observe te artwork liberally , so that afterwards you can read these founding lines and leisure in them?. It is worth doing.
There is a series of considerations in this founding act of which I identify myself enormously and I think that they have helped me, in such a way unconsciously at first, to participate in a process of a very personal identification or projection with your working concept. I refer to the confluence of territories such as "Emotional and Rational", "The Intuitive and Discursive" and to be always open to the possibility of using whatever material, something in my opinion is one of the essential characteristics of the contemporary creator.
I think it is very interesting and also what makes it stand out that your studies of being an artist painter is never abandoned, but transforms through using the most diverse materials and supports as possible. I refer to decisions such as using your own scooter as a canvas in dialogue with the fronts of colourful buildings of the Canaries; how you reused bits of carpet and other material you found in the tips of the islands; the use of windsurfing sails; the painting and marking of abandoned buildings, or the spaces accentuated such as "Las Eras" to collect water in the island of Lanzarote.
“You are painting” a scene in a singular geographical area and a singular architecture. It was an action so contemplative and aesthetic as well as critical, on a natural geography that survives in a pulse of decades with the fiercest speculative development. Processes that have provoked in many cases the closure of a way of rural living to give way to uncontrolled and predatorily building of the territory, generating a new landscape in which the old abandoned building, after they had stopped being used, lead to a new scene of occupation made at a speed so fast by the new buildings as well as the construction debris abandoned on the edge of the incomprehensible.
At this point in my letter, and given to the fact that I have mentioned it earlier, I wish to make clear to the esteemed possible reader of these pages, that if you really wish to have a closer look at the context of work and what is vital to you work, it is extremely necessary as well as fundamental that you read the artistic autobiography. An absolutely clarifying text that shows the keys of your modus operandi, the mental structure, discursive and emotional that stands out in all of your work.
I have an enormous respect for these writings where the author, in this case an artist of the visual and plastic, not in an easy exercise of introspection and looking back, try to summarise and show with generosity and humility what has been a very important part of his life, linked inexorably to the creative processes.
Not only a year and a half ago, I was the commissioner or curator, in the Atlantic Centre of Modern Art (Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno – CAAM) in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, of the retrospective exposition of the Mexican artist Guillermo Gomez-Peña. A project in which we presented an extensive book of his work, and of which I don't tire of making a point and advise the reading, almost obligatory, for those that wish to journey into his creative world, of his artistic autobiography, and his exactly as in your case my esteemed and dear friend Eberhard. Not in vain I have had in mind for many years to create a collection of publications in this testimonial line and which could have the title of "Tex-timonies. A written autobiographical work of Artists."
If I had to make stand out some of the many enriching aspects of your work, or better yet, of your way to work, I would also establish a simile with the writer which uses such a subtle as well as clear language. A writer to which would qualify as a possessor of an enormous range of accents, something that we know that also stands out in the music world.
There is no doubt that putting accents is not an easy task, we know that placed incorrectly they produce dissonances that can hurt the senses. Far from this your work on the landscape that produces a very positive re-categorisation of the elements or everyday objects, architectural and structures of those occupied or intervened territories.
An accent, that of a writer-unveiler of new places, new "moles" that would go by undetected by the majority of those that walk by these spaces day after day or every now and then.
Since I had the opportunity of knowing your work on the islands, which came as a result of our meeting at the beginning of the nineties, in the Documentation Centre of the aforementioned Atlantic Centre of Modern Art in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, where I worked for practically a decade; from that first moment I felt very close and identified with your work.
While we chatted and saw images of your projects in the catalogues, those interventions in the constructions and in the landscape made me feel, without knowing at first why, in a familiar space of sensibility. Later I realised that it was the way of making, framing and emphasising the objects, the constructions and the landscape. As time went on, the visualisation of your work was effectively activating my memory and transporting me to that chosen solitude of the room of my infancy. Memories of my hours enjoying in silence making the pieces of art which I had to present in school the following day, no matter if they were from Natural science, Social studies, art & craft or History, where I saw myself outlining with felt tips or pencil colours, the letters or cutout images stuck onto almost always black card. Those little panoramic paintings, that should have been shown or hung up in the classroom, not really finished, without that frame, without that last accent, over what I wanted to have stand out; and to do this, at the end of the process, was something with which I enjoyed immensely because a new reality opened up before my eyes.
Now that I read again this earlier paragraph, and want to add shortly, I know that sometimes they ask how I dare talk about my life in the texts that I write about some artists. I think sincerely that those works or trajectories are able to activate our memory, our imaginary, or transport us to the nearby parts of our territories and emotional geographies; they could be an object of a written piece of work that is closer, warmer, situated also, why not, in a space of projection and complicity.
It is at this point where I would like to speak, dear Eberhard, of after so many years of meetings and exchanging information we had the opportunity of working together in the year 2009. It was the context of the second "Biennial of the Canaries", where I invited you to be a part of the nine national and international artists that were integrated in the project "Coexistences" and which I had the opportunity to commission the event: a biennial on the Canary Islands about art, architecture and landscape. This was totally clear for me when I started to idea this project that counted on your participation, because if there is an artist in the Canary Islands who has made these three territories an essential and fundamental part of all his work that would be you.
Once accepted the invitation, I expected, I must confess, that the proposal you were going to give would frame in the context of your "accents" about abandoned constructions in the landscape, and that is what you did. You immediately commented to me that the journey you had recently made with your car at the exit and the north road of the city of Las Palmas in the direction towards the Port of Agaete, where you had to take the ferry to return to Tenerife from Gran Canaria, you had seen two abandoned buildings that you would like to use and that this exposition "Coexistencies" was a magnificent opportunity to do so.
These ruins were and are near an area that is known on the island of Gran Canaria as Bañaderos, and to clarify exactly where you had seen them you sent me photos or screen captures taken from Google Earth with the exact location, even including the geographical coordinations. Taking into account that I live in the city of Santander, in the north of Spain, and I was not in those moments to travel to the city of Las Palmas, I asked a favour of a good friend and Geographer, Siani Tavio*, if he could find the ruins that appeared in the photo taken from Google Earth, knowing that we had to get in touch with the owners to explain our wish and to ask permission, because the intervention would be in the context of a Biennial project, generated from an public institution such as the Canarian Government.
Siani Tavio found the ruins and sent me a series of images of them, which I directly sent to you and you identify them as the buildings you wished to intervene. The next step, once receiving then permissions, was to plan the intervention of these ruins that, we have to say, were and are of a huge scale, which was not going to be an easy task. For this I spoke to another good friend of mine, artist and photographer Rafael Hierro, and asked him to accompany me not only to assist in the task of intervention but to also photographically document the whole process of the work on the ruins.
I remember how you and Rafael Hierro commented on how hard it was to intervene on these buildings, framing all the profiles with an adequate thick line and to a scale that made them visible at a great distance.
For those who thought that the artist, in this case, is a mere designer of projects, nothing further from reality. I Can and wish to leave constancy in this letter of how the physical undertaking of each of the interventions of Eberhard Bosslet is for the artist a fundamental part of the process. Once more we can see that the young painter never abandoned the artist that intervened and accents those other possible landscapes. The satisfaction of his own work finished, that washing of painted hands after hours of intense work stuck up a huge ladder and under the hot Canarian sun, was something that you don't wish to give up.
There are some crafts, artists and craftsman, indispensable in a large part of your work as well as was evident in that unforgettable denominaste intervention as "Reformation VIII".
I do not want to finish this letter without pointing out those that read your book and have the experience of living and sharing you work, that they do not forget, that behind those photographs, installations, objects, and above all the interventions, there is an artist, a painter and an "architect" of new ways of understanding art and the landscape, that have permitted us, the Canarian people, to see another way of looking at the different shapes of objects, buildings and places that now, transcended its anonymity, they can communicate and speak with us.
Wishing that we can soon have the opportunity to meet and share a new project, I wish you the most success and I send you my dearest hug.
Orlando Britto Jinorio
in Santander 9th October 2013.
Translation Greg Maverick
*I take this moment in this text to thank again the generous collaboration of Siani Tavio and Rafael Hierro in the process of the work of the mentioned intervention "Reformation VIII". These and other credits that accompanied my catalog text for the "II Biennial de Canarias", were not then published.
Dear friend Eberhard :
It is always a joy to hear from you. I have to tell you that I delightedly accept your proposal to write a text for the book you wish to edit and summarise such immense and fantastic artwork which you have done in the last thirty years.
It is not the first time I have decided to tackle a text on the work of an artist in the way of an epistolary genre. I beg your pardon for my forwardness. I feel more comfortable in this environment and it allows me to maintain closeness, warmth and respect of a friendship built from the shared passion for art and all its possible areas of action.
I think you know me well and know that for a few years I take my texts into account from a perspective where I want to show the aspects form a human point of view, which I believe are revealing, and I have been able to discover or share with artists with whom I have been fortunate to build projects with over the years.
The edition of your retrospective book which you are preparing, with a comprehensive collection of texts, images and projects will be, without a doubt, a wonderful tool and clarifying the true enormity of your work, a piece of related work which is emotionally linked to a very substantial part of your time and life to the geography of the Canary Islands. Ever since your first visit to the islands in 1981 to the present day which is nicely narrated by you it the artistic autobiography in this book; an artistic project which is in a continuous relationship with the archipelago, a "place of places" key on your personal emotional mapping.
In one of the paragraphs of, in my opinion, your essential autobiographical text, which you speak about when there is a moment to feel that you are really affected by a lucky "insular virus".
What starts off as an initiated journey for you at the beginning of the eighties, the long journey of an outstanding German art student in his post grads, a young artist that photographed and looks in a different way at the elements of the rural and urban landscape of these islands; and who was occasionally returned and spent time on a global project where art and life came together, giving it such a particular shape as well as deep, necessary and complementary, insular reflection. The source and unconscious insular condition of that young student from Berlin, coming from the great city-island and metropolis, Berlin, starts to flower, in the beginning of those years during those first encounters with those strange as well as fantastic geographies "destroyed" by the insular Canarian man.
But for this to happen, for this encounter to be produced and development of a singular and coherent piece of work that has been around for more than thirty years, in a really amazing scale of work, and from a perspective of planning and multiple artistic execution and interdisciplinary, of numerous registers, where the ephemera action is integrated in the landscape to then subtly and poetically disappear in time, and only preserved in photographic documents. For this to happen, I insist, a series of circumstances of a formative and discursive character, they had previously come together in that young central-European artist that came to that beautiful yet disconcerting, and on occasions shocking, " built-up landscape" of "The garden of Hespérides"
At the start of the eighties you went to Berlin, my dear Eberhard, and founding member of the artist collective known as "Material und Wirkung e. V". Of which I am totally sure that with your fundamental manner in the writing of the manifest or trust act of the fore mentioned. Very few times have I had the opportunity to read a manifest of an artist that is so clearly and coherently materialising in the development throughout the trajectory and artistic career. Convictions of youth and an enormous maturity that evolves and transforms with the passing of time within the script that maintains an argumentative line which is as solid as it is open.
Since I read the first words and advanced in the text I could not stop from repeating through very quickly the hundred or so images of your projects that you have been practically sending me for the twenty years we have known each other and through your publications, compact discs you sent or most recently your website.
The Trust act or Manifest of your group explained it like this:
"The materials and their effects will be investigated through the viewpoints and emotional methods of procedure, functional, intuitive, discursive, and culturally random. Attention will be paid to the results, states and forms of investigation, processes, products and situations and these facts will be documented.
Everything, substances, living creatures, relationships systems and structures in open spaces, artificial economical, scientific, social and cultural will be considered "Materials".
Any rational quality, perception or experience produced by the materials or those that take us to them will be considered "Effect"."
Without a doubt I invite from now on the reader of this retrospective book and the future public that can see and participate in your expositions, or visit "in situ" your interventions, which this manifest takes, as if it were a visitor's card, in you pocket, wallet or purse, and as an exercise, firstly observe te artwork liberally , so that afterwards you can read these founding lines and leisure in them?. It is worth doing.
There is a series of considerations in this founding act of which I identify myself enormously and I think that they have helped me, in such a way unconsciously at first, to participate in a process of a very personal identification or projection with your working concept. I refer to the confluence of territories such as "Emotional and Rational", "The Intuitive and Discursive" and to be always open to the possibility of using whatever material, something in my opinion is one of the essential characteristics of the contemporary creator.
I think it is very interesting and also what makes it stand out that your studies of being an artist painter is never abandoned, but transforms through using the most diverse materials and supports as possible. I refer to decisions such as using your own scooter as a canvas in dialogue with the fronts of colourful buildings of the Canaries; how you reused bits of carpet and other material you found in the tips of the islands; the use of windsurfing sails; the painting and marking of abandoned buildings, or the spaces accentuated such as "Las Eras" to collect water in the island of Lanzarote.
“You are painting” a scene in a singular geographical area and a singular architecture. It was an action so contemplative and aesthetic as well as critical, on a natural geography that survives in a pulse of decades with the fiercest speculative development. Processes that have provoked in many cases the closure of a way of rural living to give way to uncontrolled and predatorily building of the territory, generating a new landscape in which the old abandoned building, after they had stopped being used, lead to a new scene of occupation made at a speed so fast by the new buildings as well as the construction debris abandoned on the edge of the incomprehensible.
At this point in my letter, and given to the fact that I have mentioned it earlier, I wish to make clear to the esteemed possible reader of these pages, that if you really wish to have a closer look at the context of work and what is vital to you work, it is extremely necessary as well as fundamental that you read the artistic autobiography. An absolutely clarifying text that shows the keys of your modus operandi, the mental structure, discursive and emotional that stands out in all of your work.
I have an enormous respect for these writings where the author, in this case an artist of the visual and plastic, not in an easy exercise of introspection and looking back, try to summarise and show with generosity and humility what has been a very important part of his life, linked inexorably to the creative processes.
Not only a year and a half ago, I was the commissioner or curator, in the Atlantic Centre of Modern Art (Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno – CAAM) in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, of the retrospective exposition of the Mexican artist Guillermo Gomez-Peña. A project in which we presented an extensive book of his work, and of which I don't tire of making a point and advise the reading, almost obligatory, for those that wish to journey into his creative world, of his artistic autobiography, and his exactly as in your case my esteemed and dear friend Eberhard. Not in vain I have had in mind for many years to create a collection of publications in this testimonial line and which could have the title of "Tex-timonies. A written autobiographical work of Artists."
If I had to make stand out some of the many enriching aspects of your work, or better yet, of your way to work, I would also establish a simile with the writer which uses such a subtle as well as clear language. A writer to which would qualify as a possessor of an enormous range of accents, something that we know that also stands out in the music world.
There is no doubt that putting accents is not an easy task, we know that placed incorrectly they produce dissonances that can hurt the senses. Far from this your work on the landscape that produces a very positive re-categorisation of the elements or everyday objects, architectural and structures of those occupied or intervened territories.
An accent, that of a writer-unveiler of new places, new "moles" that would go by undetected by the majority of those that walk by these spaces day after day or every now and then.
Since I had the opportunity of knowing your work on the islands, which came as a result of our meeting at the beginning of the nineties, in the Documentation Centre of the aforementioned Atlantic Centre of Modern Art in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, where I worked for practically a decade; from that first moment I felt very close and identified with your work.
While we chatted and saw images of your projects in the catalogues, those interventions in the constructions and in the landscape made me feel, without knowing at first why, in a familiar space of sensibility. Later I realised that it was the way of making, framing and emphasising the objects, the constructions and the landscape. As time went on, the visualisation of your work was effectively activating my memory and transporting me to that chosen solitude of the room of my infancy. Memories of my hours enjoying in silence making the pieces of art which I had to present in school the following day, no matter if they were from Natural science, Social studies, art & craft or History, where I saw myself outlining with felt tips or pencil colours, the letters or cutout images stuck onto almost always black card. Those little panoramic paintings, that should have been shown or hung up in the classroom, not really finished, without that frame, without that last accent, over what I wanted to have stand out; and to do this, at the end of the process, was something with which I enjoyed immensely because a new reality opened up before my eyes.
Now that I read again this earlier paragraph, and want to add shortly, I know that sometimes they ask how I dare talk about my life in the texts that I write about some artists. I think sincerely that those works or trajectories are able to activate our memory, our imaginary, or transport us to the nearby parts of our territories and emotional geographies; they could be an object of a written piece of work that is closer, warmer, situated also, why not, in a space of projection and complicity.
It is at this point where I would like to speak, dear Eberhard, of after so many years of meetings and exchanging information we had the opportunity of working together in the year 2009. It was the context of the second "Biennial of the Canaries", where I invited you to be a part of the nine national and international artists that were integrated in the project "Coexistences" and which I had the opportunity to commission the event: a biennial on the Canary Islands about art, architecture and landscape. This was totally clear for me when I started to idea this project that counted on your participation, because if there is an artist in the Canary Islands who has made these three territories an essential and fundamental part of all his work that would be you.
Once accepted the invitation, I expected, I must confess, that the proposal you were going to give would frame in the context of your "accents" about abandoned constructions in the landscape, and that is what you did. You immediately commented to me that the journey you had recently made with your car at the exit and the north road of the city of Las Palmas in the direction towards the Port of Agaete, where you had to take the ferry to return to Tenerife from Gran Canaria, you had seen two abandoned buildings that you would like to use and that this exposition "Coexistencies" was a magnificent opportunity to do so.
These ruins were and are near an area that is known on the island of Gran Canaria as Bañaderos, and to clarify exactly where you had seen them you sent me photos or screen captures taken from Google Earth with the exact location, even including the geographical coordinations. Taking into account that I live in the city of Santander, in the north of Spain, and I was not in those moments to travel to the city of Las Palmas, I asked a favour of a good friend and Geographer, Siani Tavio*, if he could find the ruins that appeared in the photo taken from Google Earth, knowing that we had to get in touch with the owners to explain our wish and to ask permission, because the intervention would be in the context of a Biennial project, generated from an public institution such as the Canarian Government.
Siani Tavio found the ruins and sent me a series of images of them, which I directly sent to you and you identify them as the buildings you wished to intervene. The next step, once receiving then permissions, was to plan the intervention of these ruins that, we have to say, were and are of a huge scale, which was not going to be an easy task. For this I spoke to another good friend of mine, artist and photographer Rafael Hierro, and asked him to accompany me not only to assist in the task of intervention but to also photographically document the whole process of the work on the ruins.
I remember how you and Rafael Hierro commented on how hard it was to intervene on these buildings, framing all the profiles with an adequate thick line and to a scale that made them visible at a great distance.
For those who thought that the artist, in this case, is a mere designer of projects, nothing further from reality. I Can and wish to leave constancy in this letter of how the physical undertaking of each of the interventions of Eberhard Bosslet is for the artist a fundamental part of the process. Once more we can see that the young painter never abandoned the artist that intervened and accents those other possible landscapes. The satisfaction of his own work finished, that washing of painted hands after hours of intense work stuck up a huge ladder and under the hot Canarian sun, was something that you don't wish to give up.
There are some crafts, artists and craftsman, indispensable in a large part of your work as well as was evident in that unforgettable denominaste intervention as "Reformation VIII".
I do not want to finish this letter without pointing out those that read your book and have the experience of living and sharing you work, that they do not forget, that behind those photographs, installations, objects, and above all the interventions, there is an artist, a painter and an "architect" of new ways of understanding art and the landscape, that have permitted us, the Canarian people, to see another way of looking at the different shapes of objects, buildings and places that now, transcended its anonymity, they can communicate and speak with us.
Wishing that we can soon have the opportunity to meet and share a new project, I wish you the most success and I send you my dearest hug.
Orlando Britto Jinorio
in Santander 9th October 2013.
Translation Greg Maverick
*I take this moment in this text to thank again the generous collaboration of Siani Tavio and Rafael Hierro in the process of the work of the mentioned intervention "Reformation VIII". These and other credits that accompanied my catalog text for the "II Biennial de Canarias", were not then published.
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