Poetical routes
It is a strange mingling «the artist’s book», which condenses the synthesis of poetry as well as the different characteristics of the artistic object together with the soul, the matrix and the dignity of the book itself. Although its purpose has not been to be read in the traditional way, it is here for anyone willing to expand the place of the experience. The reading of such a work demands an opening to a great variety of elements that increases our life registers. In spite of being fragile, the artist’s book requires an indispensable action: it is touched, manipulated, and I would say, it is activated by the public. There is no desecration in the act of receiving a poetical object created by an artist whose recipient proceeds similar to the way an archeologist does when he finds a piece, also the artist works with it, discovering the communicative code to use and the hidden intention to find.
Thus, when Monica Goldstein alters, deepens, feeds or transforms an old book, the unexpected scene appears, where she redesigns and projets her work and her world, both in the same movement. The artist creates herself in her acts and so her work becomes the most genuine expression of the self-discovery. The necessity to create similar worlds gives birth to the name TAA-GA, her inner kingdom. She makes her books in the same way Victor Grippo did. Victor honoured the artistic work as an absolutely handicrafted contact with the materials, each element incorporated is carefully chosen. During her work, Goldstein goes through her inner mazes in a creative meditation. When the ritual of the work has been carried out, the fragments are ordered in harmony and a silent spiritualism settles down in the work.
The Book of the Space was created as a tribute to the artist Teresa Volco. The black velvet as a cosmic sidereal space addresses to the absolute. A red stone points out the double possibility of closure or opening. When we do open the book, we find a minimalist style in tune with Teresa’s spirit. The piece made of transparent acrylic contains a floating page with a red dot aligned with the external stone. But this time, the red colour has been imbroidered, each stitch tying the intimate memories of the friend who has recently died; a necessity of a true testimony leaves its impression in the choice of the white material that belonged to Volco.
In About reality, the artist juxtaposes a variable number of stones and signs with which she overwrites the original book. The progressive sequence of divesting both of them, together with the emptiness conceived opens a place for the discovery of what is new. The protagonism of stones in the cover of the book gives way till it is mixed in a strange confusion of veiled signs and words. The black stone stands for the target, the arrival point that articulates the work and resends to the beginning. Carl Young collects the testimonies of ancient societies which used stones to symbolize the place of gods and spirits. The story about Jacob`s dream, in the Old Testament, reveals how a stone represented God`s home. In megalithic sanctuaries, the deity is represented by many pure stones, placed in predetermined ways. In the Zen Gardens the place of the stones also implies a spiritual value.
The book gets almost silent of words in the Treatise of subtle Geography and the vision of the maps expands. The artist has made two inner spaces, in one of them a character with a yoga posture called «Gokilasana» lives and, in the other, there is a blue rose. Monica clarifies that «the rose is neither dry nor dead, at the beginning I looked for a crimson or white rose and then, a blue one appeared». It is surprising the coincidense with the poet Novalis who symbolized poetry and spiritualism with a blue rose. She, the artist, works from the fragment, starts to investigate an idea with great curiosity, goes through the materials and elaborates an organization of the work little by little. An itinerary, through an overcrowded universe till she finds an axis, an arrow that indicates a silent clarity. It is evident that the cognitive way that the artist goes over in the making of the work commits herself as a real hole. A peculiar anchorage in its own centre-axis allows her to connect the blue point of the back of the character in asana toghether with the inner axis. This crossing is the key point that gives sense to work and existence.
Monica renews her love for a particular type of writing that works out from a gesture toghether with her oriental graphic designs, thus inventing a speech that declines worn out words. «You have known how to produce a number of shapes, neither figurative nor abstract that can be placed under the name of illegible writing, which suggest to you readers neither the messages nor the possible forms of expression but the idea, the essence of the writing. Nothing is more difficult than to produce an essence, I mean a form that is only reverted in its name». This is what Roland Barths wrote in 1971 to the artist Mirta Dermisache, trying to define her graphic signs. We can extend his concerts to Monica Goldstein´s work.
Time, poetry, the universe and its principles, the generating emptiness of the East and the baroque occupation of the space with different textures. Mazes, puzzles and rituals. Opacities, transparencies, reflections, a certain tension among the opposites. Everything turns into a mysterious and magic journey she began a long time ago and which she invites us to share along her fifteen years of artistic books. In the forge fire supports desire. Her lonely journeys are spiritual paths meaning the necessity to understand the mysteries of the universe.
Corinne Sacca Abadi / AACA/AIC / 2002