Paintings & Drawings2020shown

HYELTW?

Five metres of bleached black paper, with the title buried in it as a cryptogram

Two people lifting a five-metre roll of black paper off the floor of an empty white gallery, the sheet arcing between them like a suspended cable

The full length of the black panel unrolled flat across a concrete gallery floor, two people crouched at either end, a spirit level lying beside it — Unrolled in the room before hanging

Three people holding the whole five-metre panel up flat against a white wall at head height, its bleached figures visible along its length — Held up by three people to find its line

The panel hung and lit on a white gallery wall, a visitor in a red coat standing beneath it for scale in a large empty room — Espronceda, Barcelona, November 2020

Five metres of black paper, one metre tall, joined from sheets. The marks are not painted on. The paper was depigmented with sodium hypochlorite, household bleach, so every figure is the sheet itself lifted back to cream and gold, drawn with a nib and with tools made for the job. It is the same method as the caustic drawings, at wall scale, and it took hundreds of hours.

The five metre panel across a white gallery wall, one visitor walking past it for scale — Espronceda, November 2020, photographed by Victor

The room wide, the panel along one wall and two smaller works on the wall beside it — The wall it shared

The full five-metre panel reproduced flat: black paper covered edge to edge with cream and gold figures, boxes, bursts and small drawn signs — The whole panel, five metres wide

The panel on white with a line drawn down to an enlarged band from its centre, showing a hand-drawn alphabet with small stacks of letters and numbers above and below certain letters — The key: read each stack upward, then in number order

The whole field is one illustrated story with a cryptogram buried in it. Near the middle sits a hand-drawn alphabet. Six of its letters carry a short stack of letters above them and a number below. Read each stack upward, then read the stacks in number order: HAVE YOU EVER LEFT THIS WORLD? That question is the title.

The alphabet passage of the panel, close: a hand-drawn A to Z in bleach with short stacks of mirror-written letters above six of them and numbers below, and a row of glyph creatures beneath — The alphabet itself, and the creatures under it. The stacked letters are written in mirror.

The same panel hung vertically from the ceiling, its lower end rolling out onto the concrete floor, with a visitor in a red coat reaching up to point at one of the figures — The same panel dropped vertically, tail on the floor. Espronceda, 2020.

The five-metre panel hung flat along a bare sand-coloured brick wall in a long room, a small printed label to its left — Raima, Barcelona, summer 2021, five metres against bare brick

It was shown at Espronceda Institute of Art and Culture, Barcelona, from 12 to 15 November 2020, opening at seven in the evening on the 12th, the panel went up on the 10th, and the first visitors were photographed under it at 19:26 on opening night, five metres carried up by three people and levelled by hand, flat along a white wall. During that show it also hung the other way, dropped vertically from height so the tail rolled out across the concrete. The following summer it went to Raima, the old paper house, and ran the length of a bare brick wall: old masonry behind a surface covered in invented writing.

Medium: Sodium hypochlorite (household bleach) on black paper, nib and handmade tools
Materials: Black paper, Sodium hypochlorite (household bleach), Nib and handmade tools
Dimensions: 100 × 500 cm
Role: Artist
Creative direction: Diana Boier
Photography: Vittor Schetti
Exhibited: HYELTW?, Espronceda Institute of Art & Culture, Barcelona, 2020 · Art Lover Solo × OVB, Raima, Barcelona, 2021