Jorge Méndez Blake

On this occasion, his point of departure is the reformulation of the concept of library, to which end he resorts to the poem by the French symbolist, Stéphane Mallarmé, Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le Hazard (A throw of the dice will never abolish chance), written in 1897 and published that same year in Cosmopolis magazine. Focusing on one of the textual threads of the poem, written in small capitals and which says −and I quote− “QUAND MÊME LANCÉ DANS DES CIRCONSTANCES ÉTERNELLES DU FOND D'UN NAUFRAGE”(Even when cast under eternal circumstances from the depth of a shipwreck) , this library, which is the subject of debate, becomes a stranded object that serves to reinterpret the three capital points of the critical theory referred to the poet: silence, space, and the boundaries of writing.
Here Méndez Blake resorts to architecture to make dimensionality and volume in or of space possible, and he situates the objects in the show in such a way that the viewer may suggest and interpret new paths in relation to what surrounds culture and the development of avenues of knowledge, something the artist himself identifies directly with the shipwreck to which Mallarmé makes reference. Indeed, this sinking and what surrounds it constitute the pillar on which the exhibit is structured and the axis around which the whole proposal revolves, including the appropriations of a portrait of the poet by the French painter Claude Monet, or William Miller’s print, which
Méndez Blake presents as a large mural showing a raging sea in another literal indication of the shipwreck and its space.