Xisco Mensua

48 publicaciones is the name I’ve given to a study of the contemporary art library a friend of mine has at home to which he has generously given me access. One day I told him that I would like to make a selection of his art books for a suite of paintings reproducing their covers and some pencil drawings of aspects related to their content.

The starting point for the selection was the sixties and artists like Ed Ruscha and the Fluxus group who treated the artist’s book as an artwork in its own right. These were followed by publications by conceptual artists, photo-books, poetry collections and other texts published up until the present day. I should also clarify that the selection is purely subjective on my behalf and has no pretensions to establish any kind of historical continuity. I was guided more by certain affinities, and I did not include some very beautiful catalogues of paintings that were highly influential for my own practice because they were outside the initial remit; paintings are much more eloquent on walls than in reproductions in books. Paradoxically, I have taken to painting and drawing techniques that, as I said earlier, I use for the reproductions, an art in principle more removed from them. Not so much from drawing …

My hope is that the collection of book covers, 48 in total, will function like a field, perhaps disperse and even with subgroups but nevertheless one single field. The form of exhibiting it will depend on the space where it will be shown. It has occurred to me that, given the impossibility of showing the collection of drawings physically, because of their sheer number, they could be shown in a slide projection, one by one, in this way taking on the quality of a document and archive.

I am also considering the idea of accompanying the two collections with a couple of display cases showing the making-of of each one.