CARTA BLANCA... PARA HACER QUÉ?*(CARTE BLANCHE... TO DO WHAT?

1. To give carte blanche is to give someone total freedom to do whatever he/she wants (something that, no doubt, we would all like to be granted often). But this freedom is paradoxical, because as we know, freedom that is not won or conquered loses its force and partly disables its nature, causing doubt as to which path to choose, inevitably ending up in the question: to do what?

2. A blank space, a blank page, to leave the mind blank... silences, dispositions so many times unavoidable to start something, to push us towards some direction; the minimum bases to begin to say everything or to resolve that maybe we have nothing to say... or that it is not even necessary to say it.

3. Whatever the artist has to do or say need not be expressed by gestures or grandiloquent acts. The basic tools at the artist's disposal are his attitude, his gaze, his disposition? Perhaps his questions; the artist should not need anything else.

4. In 1949, John Cage in a lecture structured as a musical score, entitled Lecture on Nothing, said, "I have nothing to say, and I am saying it, and this is poetry as I need it."

5. Vergílio Ferreira writes in his book Pensar: "Of what is not said in a work of art, there is what is not said in a work of art, there is what is not said because it is not interesting and what is not said because it is impossible to say it. That is the most important thing that the work says". All art is a form of literature, because all art consists of saying something. There are two ways of expressing, to speak and to remain silent. All the arts except literature are projections of an expressive silence. In all the arts other than literature one must look for the silent phrase they contain, or the poem, or the novel, or the theatrical work". Álvaro de Campos (Heteronym of Fernando Pessoa), from the article Otra nota al azar.

7. We should flee from the often excessive rigor of explaining everything, which, as Voltaire said, is the best way to bore.

Or as Jean Echenoz said about books: "a book is not written in order to talk about it later, but in order not to have to about it, but so as not to have to talk about it, especially not to have to talk about it". Carte blanche... to do what? is an exhibition that aims to be, above all, a suggestion, an opening, a gesture; an invitation to "stroll" through what the works gathered here say and what they do not say. 

* Carta blanca... para hacer qué? is an exhibition with the participation of Carla Andrade, Enrique Lista and Rosendo Cid at Nordés Gallery, in Santiago de Compostela within the cycle Carta Blanca #2 (to Rosendo Cid).