Even before finding any other direct reference that could be detected, or that the artist herself could state, in relation to her vocational links with Eastern culture and specifically Japanese culture, from the very title of the exhibition, Fandake, Michelle Dabul seems to warn us that We are going to enter an area whose threshold of access implies tacit adherence to a membership, as it is now understood on the platforms, and more specifically under the implicit membership of the cult of what it defines as “sensual imagination.” In that sense, at the intersection of industriality and manual craft, of contemporaneity and tradition, the link with the essential character of the series of pieces presented here could be framed, in a “mixed” semantic universe, with the subsequent visual and conceptual manifestations. of that pregnant thought.

For now, the eminently vertical format of the supports that stand at a height that triples their width is reminiscent of the rolling fabrics called kakemono or kakejiku, which generally display paintings and calligraphic developments. In evident harmony with this tacit relationship, the associations continue from the evanescent tactility and atmospheric reverie to which the artist turns by superimposing layers of tracing paper, on which she has drawn organic developments of lines that grow, expand and They interrelate, following growth patterns that are sometimes unknown, sometimes related to naturalistic ornamentation or landscape insinuation.

Thus, oriental nutrients are once again insinuated in the way in which Dabul experientially and poetically conceives the dilemma of absence/presence as a phenomenon of the visible world, that entity that in Buddhism is called the floating world and that alludes to the fleeting nature of existence. . A fungal germination spreads over the misty surfaces, generating subtle generative structures of elucidation as impalpable as the quality of the plane that contains them, whose proportions shelter with harmonious naturalness the cellular flutters that multiply moving in curved strata, just as they are inscribed in a ocean of silence the textural resolutions that interconnect like the islands of a purely graphic archipelago.

The delicate paths of the Indian ink are impregnated in the bases of slight transparencies, making the paper just a melancholic light, so that the two-dimensional containment is abyssed in the space that opens and submerges in a paradoxical aerial depth; The intermediate values ​​of gray and black lead the eye towards the last ghostly vibration, almost imperceptible, that survives like a breath of infinite breath. At the same time, the appearance of plots of lines arranged in longitudinal parallelisms or in simulacra of lines, sharp as scars on a sensitive epidermis, seem to erupt from another order, in a way to strategically encourage the viewer to decipher this kind of polysemic enigma that unfolds before your eyes.

An analogous stimulation is also proposed in the installation piece that welcomes the visitor from the windows of the exhibition space: a six-meter-high object with totemic resonances in its singular corporeality imposes itself as a hypothetical archetype of a rituality strictly concentrated on no other dogma. other than the perceptive. Two perimeter grids – one closing it at the top and the other supporting the support base – add the tension and optical impact of the steel to the amalgamation of linear black threads and micro-perforated metal sheets, in a new orchestration of superpositions that once again dissolve all certainty.

Michelle Dabul is an artist committed to reflecting on the sinuosities of language, both in its fatal split with the world and in its condition as nominative architecture; This is how it is perceived even in its most restricted propositions, such as in that set of anonymous napkins with the marks and stains that the cleaning of the rotring tips has left on the democratic pieces of paper. Between these almost involuntary remains and a materiality in a state of permanent transition, a dynamic spectrum of eloquence and resonance opens up, the mysterious formula that immediately makes us feel on the periphery of meaning and sheltered from formative hegemonies.

Eduardo Stupía Buenos Aires, October 2024