Fábrica de la pintura [Factory of painting] by Francisca Aninat is an exhibitive product presenting a research practice regarding painting as ethnography. The place was occupied by three pieces illustrating problematic conditions of material surfaces: folding, cutting and density. These conditions question format issues revealing the visible functions of edges, backs, and stockpiles of layers. Each one of these operations gave rise to the production of specific items: several books, a mural and a long tubular object.

Francisca Aninat set up a sewing and darning lab. Her exhibition items do not just boast the (picto)graphic effects of loose threads, basting stiches and backstiches, but, with them, she draws a small map of subjectivity on the inventoried pieces of canvas.

End-of-process remnants. The similarities with the garment industry and practices just pretend to be real. The stained canvas fragments are turned into pages, to be finally sewed, thus providing a “brutalist” bookbinding. The works are edited to show brands and signs of an economy of means that becomes most effective when it arranges a surface that is fit to embrace several priming substances. The effectiveness so obtained has got a symbolic value, in fact when you hold the object in your hands, you can sense a book with no, properly speaking, bound pages but with cut off canvas reproducing the size of documents as if they were trial records.

The records consist of sheets of paper being bound to the body by means of a needle to sew bags with thick hemp. This activity is performed by replicating the gestures of the labourers sealing big-sized crates in grocery trade industry. However, since the back of the book is left visible, Francisca Aninat shapes a spine that is “cut open”, properly tied up, so to show the stitching scar. The method through which the book is held together requires the use of household “sewing skills”. Once the books are properly arranged, the link between painting (expansion) and formwork (compression) needs to be restored. By doing so, the tubular object crossing the space reiterates how the acts of falling and bending are disposed, since its creation results from the combination of sewing practices and the use of glues and resins as preservation and endurance tools. Books are exhibited on a writing production device. The location of the tubular object recalls an example of flying writing, as if the performing conditions of mural painting were transferred elsewhere.

What Francisca Aninat exhibits on the wall is a painting body whose material nature had been attacked and just received first aid, during an ancient war where human bodies were wounded by edged and bladed weapons. The problems that are here presented are challenging the consistency of the representation and the medium. This cut off canvas and ripped up in long chunks, destroys this condition, to finally welcome the idea of continuity and declare that there is nowhere to hide or be protected. It can only be exposed on a wall, as if it was a stretched prey animal skin. Nevertheless, the very image of continuity is assembled back together here, with a joining process stressing the edge function.

The painting consists of lines resulting from the cutting process. Actually, this is no painting, it is a map instead. These cuts will clearly show the medium and this is the real place that painting is hiding. Does an image have a back side? You always see the front: canvas/pages. Canvas leaving the picture behind, to finally become books. Pages are being restored to be a medium for representation purposes. Even the back side is a writing page. We are facing sheets of paper printed on both sides. When we acknowledge it is a painting, it usually seems to be the front. This is how it was presented, not to miss anything. And this was presented as a big problem. How should these books be displayed to resemble artworks? Especially now that contemporary museography is leaving the sense of touch out of its possibilities. These books were made just to be touched. The eye is on the finger tip. The images have details that can be perceived just by touching them with a finger. Writing is disguised as a sewn item, since sewing, with its images in relief and made of threads, is marking the destiny of the letter, in its initial condition.

In the Western world, there is the need to access what is behind painting, rather than the front of the page. A sacred place must be found where these books can be displayed and the word may synthesize into an image.

The books give us the chance to return to the pre-eminence of writing as dripped painting. The only way to break up signs is by expanding a stain. On the other hand, in mural painting, the sign takes its revange by fragmenting the spreading of the surface, by stressing the cut. This is why Francisca Aninat doubles the graphing function of edges and basting stiches, to confirm the mutilation traces on the surface. The production of the tubular object can just be reclaimed in this way – an object becoming-a-sign, with the clear intention to draw in the air, between the desk (book) and the wall (painting), to expose the two conditions – line and stain- on which the factory of painting is built.

JUSTO PASTOR MELLADO
Art critic
Santiago de Chile
October 2018.

Jean Lancri, during a talk that he held in Santiago de Chile, at the university where Francisca Aninat studied, mentioned the sentence, quoting René Passeron, that perfectly suits the purpose of this presentation, by playing with the partial homophony of words: “La peinture pense; oui, mais comme pansement” (Painting thinks; yes, but as if it was a bandage).