A Puerto Rican Decolonial Abstraction: The Right for Opacity in the Work of Ivelisse Jiménez
Out of Register #3 (Fuera de registro # 3, 2019). Courtesy of the artist.
“Agree not merely to the right to difference but, carrying this further, agree to the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity. Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics.”
–Edouard Glissant in Poetics of Relation p. 190
Ivelisse Jiménez’s Out of Register #3 (Fuera de registro #3, 2019) is vibrantly featured in the main hallways of the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico (MAPR). The installation is composed of 15 vertically-hanging plastic strips, 13 horizontal ones, and over 24 strips on the floor, each bearing over 22 stained neon and pastel colors. Through this stain-painting style, Out of Register #3 decolonially abstracts the material metaphor of the unnatural disaster of coloniality. In this work and in Jiménez’s practice at large, decolonial abstraction depicts an intimate processing of colonialism and ‘readability’ through an oppositional view that celebrates the opacity of Puerto Rico’s Caribbean, Latin American, and Latinx cultural condition.
Out of Register #1 (2018). Courtesy of the artist.
Out of Register #1 (2018) occupies the Casa de los Contrafuertes in Old San Juan, superseding the colonial structure through a visual idiom that blurs yet does not hide the spatial language of coloniality. Colonial walls, staircases, hallways, and windows, as well as colonial outdoors are simultaneously represented by their intense colors and forms—not as a revelation but opaquely through decolonial abstraction. Jiménez, like other experts on abstraction ranging from Puerto Rican artist-predecessor Myrna Báez¹ to art theorists like Boris Groys, knows very well that all art forms are generally abstractions inasmuch that art is a transfigured representation of reality using symbols, figures, and design. The pipe is not a pipe in Magritte’s art, The Wake [Baquiné] is not a wake in Oller, and Pareja taína [Taíno Couple] is not a Taíno couple in Tufiño’s work.² They are all abstractions, never the thing-in-itself. Jiménez’s opaque view layers this abstraction to a juxtaposed set of meanings that renders abstraction outside of a given register––in this case, outside of the register of a colonial structure within a colonial edifice (the Casa de los Contrafuertes in Old San Juan) that functions as a material and structural metaphor of coloniality. Jiménez’s decolonial turn uses opacity through a logic of relation, very akin to Glissant’s view, by transmuting our colonial reality into a register where people historically affected by colonization live—not from a European, United States, or Western perspective, but via a Caribbean, Latin American and Latinx existence that is hegemonically interpreted as chaotic because it does not align with the colonizer’s register. Jiménez’s abstraction is decolonial inasmuch its opacity moves us to a register or a world of ‘chaos.’ Yet as Glissant states in Poetics of Relation:
Chaos-monde is neither fusion nor confusion: it acknowledges neither the uniform blend—a ravenous integration—nor muddled nothingness. Chaos is not “chaotic.” (p. 94)
Intérvalos, confines y territorios #3, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.
In Intervals, Confines and Territories #3 (Intervalos, confines y territorios #3, 2018) Jiménez depicts a truth that is materially decadent and geometrically multipolar, with a plurality that is willfully unclear. In this work, Jiménez decenters readability and faultlessness, privileging the space of the peripheral: the only place where coloniality can’t read, understand and therefore, vanquish territories. To ‘know’ is to conquer in the Americas since it was rendered the ‘New World’, despite having a pre-colonial millenary history of Indigenous civilizations. The history of Western culture is characterized by illuminating the (or a) truth because it will set you free, as the Christian bible verse ascertains. Transparency then becomes the main medium of corroboration or knowledge making. Questions addressing who has the right to see the truth and who or what is subjected to ‘the light,’ or the presumptive transparency of truth have been asked by Latinx, Latin American, and Caribbean decolonial theorists such as Anibal Quijano, Catherine Walsh, Nelson Maldonado Torres, Linda Martín Alcoff, Edouard Glissant, and others. Jiménez’s juxtapositions of dazzling opaque plastics with obsessive asymmetry and neo-kitsch neon colors are just a few elements of a language that is assembled to tell an inherently peripheral story––the story of “invisible countries”³ like Puerto Rico, best told from a narrative outside of what makes ‘sense,’ or in other words, a narrative outside of an imposed ‘truth.’
Ivelisse Jiménez showing the author one of the damaged artworks from the flooding. Photo taken by author (2022).
Image Schema #1 (2022). Courtesy of the artist.
In the wake of devastation resulting from Hurricane Fiona for Puerto Rico, and the Caribbean at large, Jiménez’s most recent works are clairvoyant, as they decolonially abstract the disaster of coloniality in Puerto Rico from the depolitized discourse of ‘natural disaster.’ Titled Image Schema, Jiménez’s new exhibition alongside Brianna Bass at LatchKey Gallery in New York runs from September 7 to October 23, September being the peak month of the hurricane season. In one of the featured artworks, Image Schema #1, Jiménez utilizes the stains and mold figures of artworks ruined by Hurricane Maria and repurposes them to represent the invisibility that colonization produces. As a result, Puerto Ricans are cast as unseen, only visible through traces or prints. Yet, through opaque prints on plastic surfaces, Jiménez makes visible the effects of disaster on presumptively invisible colonial subjects and enacts the immense capacity of Puerto Ricans to recraft life in response to the disaster of coloniality. Not to mention the more intense ‘natural’ disasters due to climate change caused by centuries of capitalist savagery. Of course, Jiménez does not explicitly represent her work as anti-colonial or decolonial because of her fidelity to abstraction and, further, her extraordinary reverence for craft. This is what makes Jiménez an astonishing artist, since one can find the heart of art as cathartic, critically-creative practice in abstraction. It is in the transformative space of process where the viewer, the artists, and social discourse coincide, and this intersection names the political direction. As stated by the artist in the introduction to the catalog for the exhibition IntervalOS (operating systems): Intervalos, confines y territorios:
“In this time of confusion, uncertainty and exhaustion, in which each day we question the very nature of our country [Puerto Rico] and our own space in its transformation process, I reaffirm myself in the urgency of being, and by continuing to build from uncertainty.”
—
Currently, Ivelisse Jiménez is featured in a new exhibition alongside Brianna Bass at LatchKey Gallery, New York. Entitled Image Schema, the exhibition will be on view from September 7 to October 23, 2022.
Notes
¹ Myrna Báez states that in an interview depicted in a short documentary entitled Reflexión sobre un legado (2014) by art historian and curator Irene Estevez Amador.
² I am referring to acclaimed Taller Boricua artist Nidza Tufiño’s Pareja Taína (1972).
³ Here, I am referring to the concept that names the book Los países invisibles (2004) by award-winning Puerto Rican writer Eduardo Lalo.
Carlos Rivera Santana is an assistant professor of Hispanic Studies at the College of William & Mary. Rivera Santana is a Latin American/Caribbean cultural studies scholar specializing in Indigenous studies, visual culture and decolonial theories. He is the author of the book, Archaeology of Colonisation: From Aesthetics to Biopolitics and is currently working on a second book with renowned artist Diógenes Ballester entitled Puerto Rican Visual Arts and its Decolonial Diasporic Character: An Arteologist Approach, signed with Centro Press—among other peer-review publications on decolonial aesthetics and interviews with other Latinx artists.