Guided tour of the Faux départ / Cabeza Borradora exhibit. Iñaki Garmendia

Faux départ / Cabeza Borradora is a creative project developed by the artist Iñaki Garmendia (Ordizia, 1972) and specifically designed to be shown at the Oteiza Museum. It is based around the lost bust of the painter José Sarriegi (Ordizia, 1911-1967) that Jorge Oteiza sculpted in 1934 and of which only a few images remain. Based on that symbolic yet intangible presence, Garmendia has developed a series of works over time that offer an approximation to and dialogue with the missing piece that highlight the value and meaning of the sculptural as creation, community and memory.

The absence of a real bust but the constancy and abundance of its image, of its representation, stands at the core of this project full of resonance that deals with key issues relating to the essence of the sculptural and is what links the pieces and the eventful lives of Oteiza and Sarriegi. Deeply involved in the processes to overhaul the aesthetics of art since the early 1930s, these artists maintained an intense yet intermittent relationship that also constitutes a reflection of the difficulties they encountered to develop their artistic creation and exercise their condition of creators in society at the time.

Over the course of this process, Garmendia has produced an extensive collection of materials that make up the project, such as sketches, axonometric projects of the original head based on its photographic reproduction, sculptural approximations of the bust and various audiovisual pieces. This series of works offers various ways to approach a reality in constant tension but that fails to fully come into focus. Such factors as repetition, melancholy and loss determine the evolution of a piece destined to never fully appear; the face of which is nothing more than an imprint. A piece condemned to auratic presence that never fully materialises but rather only partially and in a syncopated manner, thereby amplifying the estrangement between image and object, enabling reflection on the capacity of the artistic to get closer to reality through multiple sliders of meaning.

Faux départ is the seventh project in the Hazitegia programme, jointly developed by the Oteiza Museum and the Huarte Contemporary Art Centre with support from the Punto de Vista Festival and Pamplona City Council.

J. P. Huercanos