Jorge Méndez Blake

Measuring Poetry

13 October - 21 November 2014

Reception for the artist 17 October

6-8 pm

Faggionato announces the first UK solo show of Mexican artist Jorge Méndez Blake

The Waste Land (T.S. Eliot), 2014, color pencil on paper,

80 x 111cm

Complete Poetry (Samuel Beckett), 2014, color pencil on

paper, 148 x 198 cm

Faggionato is delighted to announce the first UK solo exhibition of work by Mexican artist, Jorge

Méndez Blake. Measuring Poetry runs 13 October – 21 November and comprises a new body of

work, including a series of intricate drawings, a large-scale tapestry and site-specific installation

sculptures.

Following solo shows at institutions throughout America and Europe, Méndez Blake has become

recognized on an international scale for his innovative use of literary references. Specifically,

literature and architecture create hybrids that find themselves between disciplines in his work.

Using text as the architecture from which to build the exhibition, and creating a location-specific

installation in response to the gallery’s own architectural nuances, Méndez Blake returns once

again to this central preoccupation.

Measuring Poetry sees Méndez Blake focus on ‘measuring’ the work of a series of English language

poets such as James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas, Shakespeare, Beckett and Ray

Bradbury. The measurements – corresponding to the type, the area of ink used and the stanza

silhouette – are the ‘raw matter’, and are translated into sculpture, drawing and tapestry.

The central installation piece of the show is made up of 19 floor-to-ceiling columns, which denote

the stanza silhouette of the celebrated poem by Dylan Thomas, Do not go gentle into that good

night. Set in the centre of the gallery space, the columns follow the setting points and the end of

each line of the poem.

Driving interpretations in a different direction, the exhibition includes a series of drawings, using

works by Beckett, Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot as their sources, their Complete Poetry, Complete

Sonnets and The Waste Land respectively. Determining the precise area of ink on a page, in an

obsessive, mechanical technique, this numerical value is transformed by the artist into another

form of visual language, playing with meaning in this visual-verbal interplay. Reducing the raw

form of poetry to its most simple values, and reorganizing it in the manner of a palindrome. This

contains the same “poetic matter” on either side, but with meanings unrecognizable from its

original sense. A practice made manifest in the pangram tapestry, an ambitious undertaking

conceived from the Complete Works of Poetry of Ray Bradbury, a writer better known for his fiction

novels. This seemingly unusual selection may be guided, however, by one of the major thematic

threads in his novel Fahrenheit 451 – in which within a utopian society books are banned, and

people respond by memorizing them. This way of translating into the oral form imposes a state of

constant flux upon language, which Méndez Blake now pushes further, by transforming matter into

‘nothing’ – ‘writing without writing.’ The pangram, produced in Guadalajara in a famous factory

specializing in tapestries, measures 367 x 223cm, is a response to the relation between the area

of ink and the area of paper used in the book.

Finally, Jorge Méndez Blake incorporates a third method of measuring into this body of work. All

letters—irrespective of their fonts—are made with lines, he measures letter by letter, the length

of poems by James Joyce and Elizabeth Bishop, and transforms these lengths into a series of

aluminum tube sculptures.

Renowned for the use of language and literature in his work, for this exhibition Méndez Blake has

chosen poetry as the starting point – not as a direct reference of content or even lyricism, but as a

visual construct. In a cold sense, the raw and yet intangible material of poetry is transcribed, and

the artist’s concern with how we translate one language into another becomes increasingly

marked: What is poetry?

The artist will be in London and available for interview from 10 until 20 October 2014.

EDITORS NOTES

Jorge Méndez Blake

Jorge Méndez Blake was born in 1974 in Guadalajara, Mexico, where he still lives and works.

Notable solo museum shows by Jorge Méndez Blake include: Project for a Park Library, the Museum

of Contemporary Art Denver, April 2014; All the Calvino Books (and Other Stories), Museo d’Arte

Contemporea Villa Croce, Geneva, 2012; The Marquise Went Out at Five. Jorge Méndez Blake, Museo

Tamayo, Mexico City, 2010; and All the Poetry Books, the Museum of Latin American Art, Los

Angeles. Important group shows include: My Third Land, Frankendael Foundation, Amsterdam,

Netherlands, 2013; SABER DESCONOCER, 43 Salón (Inter) Nacional de Artistas, Museo de

Antioquia, Medellín, Colombia, 2013; Earth and Elsewhere, Queensland Art Gallery, Australia, 2013;

and Resisting the Present, Museum of Modern Art, Paris, France, 2012. Jorge Méndez Blake was also

a featured artist in the 13th Istanbul Biennial.

Faggionato

Address: Faggionato, 49 Albemarle Street 1st Floor, London W1S 4JR

Telephone: +44(0)2074097979

Email: info@faggionato.com

Website: www.faggionato.com

Opening hours: Monday-Friday 10am-5:30pm; Saturday 10am-4pm

Media Enquiries

For further information and images please contact Tani Burns:

Telephone: +44(0)2073775665 / +44(0)7888731419

Email: tani@tburnsarts.com

Website: www.tburnsarts.com

Measuring Poetry, exhibition rendering*

(*Image not for use by press. Installation images available from 13 October 2014)