Cobertura para fracassos passados/en

Coberturas para fracassos passados

Daré

It is no wonder that Daré considers the series "Coberturas para fracassos passados [Coverage for past failures]" a turning point in its production. To perform this series the artist covered with alternating stripes of color some of the first canvases he had painted. It is, as the title so clearly calls it, an attempt to erase the artist's previous production. An "attempt" because it only servers to affirm its (supposed) failure, to reproduce it, to multiply its effects. Supposedly because the attempt gains its power exactly in its failure, the cover reveals, that is, it is an attempt whose success is its own failure: that is the only thing that maintains the condition of attempt, and does not hide it under the veil of the perfect, finished.

If the artist considers his past production to be a mistake, we can say that his attempt to cover them preserves, at least in part, a form of denial of it. As much as they suggest a visual negation, they still allow us to glimpse, in the relief of the lines, the erased drawings (keeping even part of the visual information). And it is Dare himself, in describing each of the erased images with words written on the stripes, who gives them even less cover. If visuality resists latent in matter, it is in written code that, evoked, the images remain.

Moreover, Daré repeats in the present an iconoclastic gesture of the past to repair it - that is, repairing the past, repairing it, covering it; as much as repairing the gesture, to notice it, to put it in evidence. The gesture in question is the "trademark", so to speak, of the French artist Daniel Buren, who since the late 1960s produces nothing but alternating colored bands, not by chance very similar to those of Daré[1]. And it is from this temporal node that the past comes back and shows itself not only as failure, but also repaired as power for the present.

Daré might very well have burnt his canvases, pricked each one, thrown them away, among so many other really destructive alternatives. In these ways, it would undoubtedly completely cover its past production. It would erase, bury, make it disappear without a trace. But much more than that, he engaged in a productive clash with them. And by so doing is able not only to show how the materiality of the past continually haunts the present, in its absence, but also how the constant attempts to repair history, whatever the intentions of these attempts, operate.

[1] Daré does not hesitate to admit that the goal has always been to evoke Buren's work.