Partial eclipse (après de Malévich), 2019

Canvas, string, screws
Canvas: 80 x 80 cm.
Total size: 140 x 140 cm.

The CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo) was founded in Barcelona in 1910 as a revolutionary trade union, but it was not until its second congress, held in 1919 at the Teatro de La Comedia in Madrid, that it defined itself ideologically as anarchist. As a tactical counter-power to the CNT and to ensure stricto sensu its libertarian postulates, the FAI (Federación Anarquista Ibérica) was created years later.

Both the CNT and the FAI remained under the same flag, half red at the top and half black at the bottom. However, when the revolutionary anarchists of the FAI wanted to stand out from the moderate syndicalists, they turned the black part upwards. If we add to this position some strings to make them run away towards the centre, the resulting shape looks like a remake of the sketch (a square divided by a diagonal, half black and half white) that Malevich made for the opera The Victory over the Sun (1913). This sketch, which appeared as a curtain in the second act of the opera, is the origin of his famous Black Square (1915).

 If we start from the premises that, according to Malevich, “A curtain representing a black square is the embryo of all possibilities” (1) and the anarchist flag a new world to come, we cannot discern a curtain from a flag or the stage from the stage. For this reason, it is not surprising that the CNT was born in a theatre or that the intellectual Carl Einstein, who joined the Durruti column during the Spanish civil war, wrote: “Be both the curtain and the play” (2).

(1) Tupitsyn, M. (Ed.). Dadá Ruso, 1914-1924. Madrid: Museo Reina Sofía, 2018, p. 42.
(2) Quoted by G. Didi-Huberman in Ante el tiempo, Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo, 2008, p. 319.

_______

Exhibition:
Theoretics of bread
Rosa Santos Gallery. Valencia. From 20 September to 22 November 2019.