OBJETOS TESTIGO (Witness objects), the new exhibition by Daniel Verbis (León, 1968), consists of a series of two recent large-format paintings, several works on paper, some collages made over the last few years and an installation of objects, books and small sculptures distributed on tables and stands that guide the visitor through the show. The exhibition is articulated around migratory objects, wandering objects that, having witnessed the activity in the artist’s studio for years, now seem to have found the right circumstance to make an act of presence, an occasion to be significant and to accommodate to a concrete idea, an occasion to become aware of their meaning and a way of presenting themselves. Like an initial stroke or sketch, these apparently irrelevant forms, these objects emancipated from any definitive meaning, have lived their day-to-day lives waiting for an opportunity to be functional and to attract our attention, an opportunity to be chosen and – by condensing an interest and elaborating a grammar- to become objects of “art”. Leaving behind an erratic life, these quasi-works of art have been shaping their idea: we are surrounded by gadgets and material objects, symptomatic entities of a mechanics of production that are the remains (unfinished) of that same mechanics of production.

In some of the works in this exhibition, the objects [sewing machine, typewriter, moulds, forms, handles, manuals (orthopedic, mechanographic, ocular)] bear witness to physical labour, to manual, industrial, craft, repetitive or machine labour…, to those poorly paid jobs, to the tasks of (man or woman)-father, to alienations of “modern times” from which one necessarily has to dissociate oneself if one wants to have a life. In a maze of office furniture and pedestals, WITNESS OBJECTS links a selection of amputated objects that seem to appeal to the anonymity of the author. These remains or proposals of objects are characterized by their condition of partiality, their unfinished character, bureaucratization…, they are trivial fragments that allude to the trivialization of the work, demonstrations of what has not been able to be represented, of what has not been achieved. Prosthesis of objects (without thesis). Humble fascination of what does not yet have its own voice. Humble fascination of what has not yet been synthesized, of the object that is about to be born. Sculpture-objects completed with glass panels or tulips, paintings without subjects that choose as their motif crude deformations of the posterior view of classical sculptures or draped fabrics essential for making colourful clothings that shroud the nakedness of desirable bodies; fragile motifs that in their fragile balance seem to appeal to a deconstruction of phalocentrism, to a phalophragilcentrism.

The object is made to idea because, being detached from a story, being in a state of flux, it is always capable of meaning something else, it always has the possibility of occupying another location. If the work of art is only definable when it comes of age, one can always think that the author is disowned when he shows incomplete objects that are simply witnesses of a particular process, witnesses of a life without identity. However, it is possible that the subject, the author, in this case Verbis, is indirectly portrayed in the unfinished. The unfinished, even if it is indefinable (and indefensible), is also, at the same time, the most authentic expression of the being under construction, authentic because by deferring the meaning, by leaving it in the air, it endows that being under construction with a life-thought still in evolution, with the possibility of continually readjusting itself and being something else once again.