Recent encounters with metaphors so piercing as to make one gasp, have drawn me to the idea

of trying to find a metaphor for a metaphor, a combination of words able to capture the essence
of the very act of putting alien words together in a way that produces the feeling of closeness to
some actual thing in the world. Trying to define the attitude that is being played out in El Luthier
now brings me back to that exercise, as although the work is by no means a metaphor in itself, it
seems to deploy the mechanism of that literary instrument.
The metaphorical mechanism has to do, foremost, with the inaccessibility of actuality, with
words functioning as mediators or codes for things that are otherwise shapeless, only perceived
by the ever-questionable tool of human senses. What metaphors do is try to use words in order
to not only bring to mind a thing as a distant object known to exist, but also evoke the actual
experience the thing holds, the abstract feeling of the thing before it is translated into the codes
of words. The way they achieve this is by creating intersections between words from separate
fields of meaning, thus flooding the readers mind with a constellation of different (coded)
thoughts and emotions that together resemble the all-encompassing complex experience of
encountering something in the world. This mechanism works not only in relation to things that
one already knows and has experienced, but can also evoke the feeling of recognition with
regard to things that are foreign or even completely fabricated.
El Luthier can be thought of as a similar construct, one that tackles the sensorial inaccessibility
of the thing it strives to evoke by intersecting it with another similarly inaccessible phenomenon.
Guillermo Rodriguez defines his ambition in the work as making the space itself become the
medium, thus pointing to the desire to turn space, this concept that we use extensively but cant
fully experience or understand with our senses, into something able to convey sensible
information and mediate artistic intention. The way this installation goes about achieving this is
by physically attaching to the bare architecture of the gallery (the peripheral, sensible aspect of
space), tightened strings able to produce sound the sensible feature of resonance. The
strings and the architecture function here like words, not loaded in themselves but used to
indicate the overlapping, un-felt but consciously present phenomena of space and resonance.
This opens up the potential of accessing these phenomena not directly, which is impossible, but
by means of this intersection which, like a metaphor for something one has never seen, can
nevertheless make them possible to recognize.
Noi Fuhrer