Cayón Madrid is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition dedicated to the work of American artist Mel Bochner (Pittsburgh, United States, 1940).
At a time when traditional compositional resources were beginning to be questioned, Bochner – along with Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, and Robert Smithson – became one of the first artists to push the boundaries of how the visual arts were understood, advancing toward an intrinsic observation of reality through language, physical space, and color as a form of illogical representation. The fusion of these three elements now shapes our understanding of the world.
Unlike the other artists previously mentioned, Bochner has explored the conventions of painting and language, ultimately concluding that language is not transparent: it is opaque or translucent. What happens when Bochner repeats a message over time is that he pushes the previous phrase from relative transparency (to clarify the message) toward relative opacity (to do the opposite).
The repetition of words obstructs their clarity, and this is what happens in Bochner’s work: the words are always legible, but not always clear, as he prints words and phrases at various overlapping angles. After all, what do you do when you send a message to someone and believe they haven’t received it? You repeat it, and if they still don’t understand, you repeat it again. In this way, he creates what is known, in Bochnerian language, as apparent synonyms – which, in the end, logically turn out not to be synonyms at all.
His pioneering introduction of language into the visual realm led Harvard University art historian Benjamin Buchloh to describe his Working Drawings from 1966 as “probably the first truly conceptual exhibition.” This show uniquely captures his need to use a wide variety of approaches as a means for expression and creativity, inviting viewers to delve deeper into his artistic journey. In this way, without being fully aware of it, language shifts from talking about art to becoming part of the art itself.
