CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/8/2020

'Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Photostats' is NEW from Siglio Press

"Untitled" (1988) is reproduced from Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Photostats, a new release from Siglio Press and one of our Staff Pick Holiday Gift Books, 2020. A small, clothbound book that is meant to be read front-to-back and flipped upside-down, back-to-front—so that one can either see the artworks on reflective paper, as if framed on the wall behind glass, or read the artist's words as short collaged texts, printed white on black matte paper—this volume carries a heavy, prescient weight, calling out events, entities, epidemics and entertainments that "appear as coded messages awaiting decipherment," in the words of Mónica de la Torre. "Unlike the stars, we do not write, luminously, on a dark field (Mallarmé)," she writes. "Yet Gonzalez-Torres’s inscriptions do act as constellations, as celestial alphabet. Events worth remembering, the count of years—they are light beams orienting us as we go on forgetting. Each cluster of dates and references displays its own oblique associative logic. The larger narrative it may or may not point to can be searingly legible or obscure to varying degrees. Regardless, those gaps between elements in each of the clusters are openings inviting us to fill in the blanks by bringing in our own associations, personal histories, and biases…"

Image above: “Untitled”, 1988, by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, copyright Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Courtesy Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation.