El arte del desvelo

Insomnia is a sleep disorder characterized by difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep, or getting enough sleep.

A fine line between consciousness and dream thoughts. A state in which the mind does not rest, and in which art can become an act or a way of dealing with incessant thoughts. Such is the case of the French-American artist Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) and her series of drawings “The Insomnia Drawings” (1994–95), from which I was inspired to make this work.”

Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development

“The Insomnia Drawings” by Louise Bourgeois is a series of 220 drawings, sketches and annotations, the product of her sleepless nights. On those long sleepless nights, Bourgeois turned to drawing and writing to channel his anxiety and reflections; he saw art as therapy.

The works combine abstraction with objects and phrases, geometric figures and repeating lines or scribbles. He worked mostly with red and blue pens.

“The art of staying awake” arises from my own experience, looking for ways to calm the mind during the early hours of the morning. Like Bourgeois, I found in these acts of expression a place to let my conscious and unconscious express themselves, where what matters is not the result that is printed on the paper but the same sensory and therapeutic act of downloading myself onto the page.

Composed of “drawings” or more specifically the trace of a line moving randomly within a canvas represented by a bed. Sounds set the scene: the stroke of a pencil moving wildly, birds singing at dawn. The work was created in three dimensions using WEBGL, the user can change the camera perspective to see it from other angles.

In “The code as a performative speech act.” (2005). Arns, Inke states that:

“The code as an effective speech act is not a description or representation of something, but, on the contrary, it directly affects, and literally becomes an action, and may even abort a process.”[^note01]

Arns sees code not only as a technical tool, but as a form of action that produces real effects in the world, similar to the artistic process of spontaneous creation, which becomes an act that transcends representation to become a means of action or intervention.

Bourgeois drew during his sleepless nights, an act that is in itself a vehicle to externalize his thoughts and anxieties. These drawings, loaded with introspection, experiences, feelings and history, would be meaningless without knowing the very cause of their existence. We could relate this same thing to César Aira’s ideas in “On Contemporary Art” in the sense of the work and its story:

“We would have to think about an expanded concept of the “aura”, which would include the story of what the work emerges. The concrete reality of the work would be made up of the work itself and the time that involved its conception and execution, understanding by this time the historical passage, in which each of its points is unique and unrepeatable, and therefore unreproducible.”²

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