Reflections from Mr. Isaías Nougués

By Isaias Nougues

When Marta Díez asked me to speak about her masks for her exhibition in Tucumán, the first thought that came to my mind was, “Which mask should I wear for the occasion?” It was not a question of talking from philosophical or psychological points of view, nor from historical ones. But then, how important it was for those of us working on art to realize that each of the expressions we use finally takes on the shape of a mask, the presence of a mask. In the end, it is as though culture itself could not have existed without a mask. Without the mask that allows us sometimes to get apart from the others, I wondered, “Does a mask conceal?” or “Is a mask a plane of symmetry between those who know who I am and those who do not?”, that is to say a constant play at being and not being, at hiding behind things. I began to think, “Masks have a cultural meaning, a religious, ceremonial meaning.” I read in the dictionary a rather poor definition of a mask as a modelling of cardboard, often painted, which is worn to conceal somebody... I would say that it is limiting, whereas in reality it is as though behind a mask there lay all the mysteries of man, who needs to be mysterious, to hide behind mystery, the mystery ranging between life and death. I thought of stage masks, those eyeless, empty masks, eyes not having arrived yet, hidden eyes being that which at a certain time bestows a meaning on a mask, while very often they also serve tthe purpose of concealing things within art itself. I thought of a drawing; the plane containing it represents a plane of symmetry between something I am looking for and something I am asking about, but which is lying deeply inside of me. That plane of symmetry is located between a question and an answer that does not arrive; it happens in art that the mask conceals what we must not know and we hide behind expressions that have succeeded in setting off from an ability, and we realize that a mask is much more useful as we keep adding things to it, because the more one´s attention is called to subjects arising from the mask in front of him, the easier it is to keep him from penetrating our way of feeling, our way of thinking. We do the same with art: we load it with things, we transform it into a mask for us to hide behind. How important are masks in our culture? We realize that they have a religious meaning, a meaning having to do with mystery, steadily telling us that it is calling man, inviting him to disclose who is behind it, the other one whom I know. How tremendously important it is for the other, in order to fix his gaze, to search our eyes and manage to get beyond the mask. I believe that masks have at all times been a challenge; a mask is that which allows expressions in Japanese stagings or mythical representations in various religions. Sometimes it has been replaced by a face that, when in the open air, turns into a mask: masks of corruption, inability, deceit. Regarding one´s own face, the mask has already vanished, and this made me think that in art we can create it again in order to retrieve the mysteries in each expression of art, as mentioned by Paul Klee in his statement, “Art does not replicate reality, it renders it visible.” Art is precisely “putting on the mask of irreality in order for reality to arise, so that truth may be deeper than we really manage to think it is”.
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Isaías Nougués. Plastic artist, Noteworthy Citizen.