Structural Integrity

INTERNATIONALLY ACCLAIMED ARTIST Jorge Méndez Blake of Guadalajara, Mexico, is in love with classic literature and what it can teach us. In his quest to create new readings of the Western literary canon, he calls upon his strong background in architecture and his nuanced understanding of how an art viewer might develop a new kind of relationship with words written generations ago. When he was young, his love of reading led him to try his hand at writing, but he didn’t feel like it was his strength. Instead, he forged ahead with art.

“Art is a way to write without using the regular tools of the writer,” he says. “It’s a type of language.”

Méndez Blake’s fusing of art, architecture, and literature isn’t as tricky as it sounds. The connective tissue between them that he explores is that of systems and structures. For him, the natural marriage between architecture and literature is the library: “In my early work, the library is where I started—for exploring ideas, for research, for documentation.” Contemplating a deliberate physical space containing so many ideas drew him to libraries and compelled him to explore the very idea of the library through a new visual language.

The artist’s visual instinct leans toward the organized and the built, nodding to architectural philosophies about space and scale and our impulse to catalogue, arrange, and deconstruct. What happens when you physically encounter a work by Méndez Blake is also a kind of threeway: a quiet communion between the artist, the text’s original author, and the viewer. Through this, Méndez Blake’s work creates an experience that carries a wisdom and pathos that most people expect only when reading a great writer’s original text.

Take his massive sculpture, The Castle. A paperback copy of Franz Kafka’s The Castle is visibly flattened underneath the heavy red bricks of a beautiful seventy-five-foot-long running wall. Kafka’s dark surrealist tale of one man’s alienation and eventual death under the weight of an unresponsive bureaucracy is given a powerful visual corollary through the crushing of the paperback itself—and by extension the words contained on its pages—which also stands in for Kafka, for Méndez Blake, for the viewer, and for Everyman.

The size and length of the wall is an overbearing and overwhelming symbol of the forces that no individual—in his bid for the recognition of his basic humanity—can even begin to overcome. Yet the book is there on the ground, intact, visible—and with a bit of effort on the part of time’s erosion or one person’s determination—still readable.

Méndez Blake, even in his precision, is a limber and versatile artist. His creations can be as ethereal as a smoky, velvety drawing on paper or as commanding as a tall stainless-steel bookcase lined with a careful pattern of fourteen books, visually evoking Mondrian, Eames, and Judd, and lines of poetry making up a stanza. Dearest Max, My Last Request is text rendered in clean white neon mounted to the wall—the phrase pulsing and glowing with Kafka’s final written words.

“I’ve been researching poetry. It’s a very strong weapon, a strong tool to change the consciousness,” he says, adding that poetry can be reassuringly and purely visual, “as in the work of Carl Andre.”

Valéry, Camus, Melville, Joyce, Dickinson, Mallarmé—many viewers may not understand particular literary references. Even still, Méndez Blake brings to his work a distilled clarity that transcends this burden. The Castle, like other works, doesn’t require a didactic wall text for the viewer to take in and comprehend. It’s as elegant and refined as poetry. The sophistication of Méndez Blake’s delivery is deceptively simple and deeply resonant. He’s created a punchy and arresting visual component of a great book or narrative that becomes, in our era, a beautiful echo of the original.

Jorge Méndez Blake’s solo exhibition, A Message from the Emperor (working title), will be at Marfa Contemporary, at 100 East San Antonio Street in Marfa, Texas, on June 2, 2017.