ATLAS Y EL OTRO by Robert Janitz at Main Room
You want a door you can be
on both sides of at once.
Maggie Smith
I come from everywhere,
and to everywhere I go:
I am art among the arts,
and in the mountains, mountain am I.
José Martí
What my eyes beheld was simultaneous;
what I shall write down will be successive, because language is successive.
Jorge Luis Borges
According to Homer, Atlas is the giant who upholds the immense pillars separating heaven and earth. He personifies mountains and landscape, symbolizing that which bears a great weight. His image appeared on the cover of the first collection of maps in history, which is why his name is now given to groups or compilations of maps and geographic charts, as well as to plates and descriptive diagrams of another territory: the body. Curiously, the name also refers to the first cervical vertebra, the point of union between the head and the skull, which allows us to nod “yes” or turn our heads to say “no.”
Janitz’s figures neither affirm nor deny. Yet their eloquent napes seem steadfastly poised at the edge of another plane of reality, observing. More membranes than borders, these figures seen from behind do not merely withhold the face; they theatricalize the act of looking as a gesture charged with ontological risk. In one way or another, directing one’s gaze—or turning to look—has always been a dangerous activity. Orpheus learned this in Greek mythology when he descended into the underworld to rescue his beloved Eurydice after her death by snakebite. Despite Hades’s explicit warning not to look at her until they had completely emerged, he turned to see whether she was following him, causing her disappearance and condemning her forever to the realm of the dead. So too did Lot’s wife, who, according to Genesis, was turned into a pillar of salt after looking back to witness the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah while fleeing. What happens when we are seen by “the other”?
Perhaps this intermediate state is the ideal observatory for that which remains to be known. Or perhaps it is a contemporary approach—a radical zoom—into the Rückenfigur of Romanticism. In 1990, Joseph Leo Koerner argued that the figure seen from behind in Caspar David Friedrich’s work did not represent someone but functioned as a device through which the viewer entered the landscape. While Janitz’s “faceless portraits” also operate as mediators, rather than contemplating nature and inviting us to do the same, they inscribe themselves within it, merging with what receives them. This transforms us from passive spectators into cautious accomplices of a powerful experience that is actively unfolding, one in which the other appears as a real yet never visible presence.
Although at first glance this body of work may seem spontaneous or minimalist, once one discovers the subtle network of physical and material logics through which Janitz gives form to experiences of alterity and communion, the viewer encounters a threshold: between the manifest and the hidden world, memory and transience, presence and absence, subjectivity and belonging. Accompanying these hirsute inhabitants are “volcano-persons” and “cells” seeking their place within fields of color that resemble bandages or building components. Together they form a shared vocabulary—not to literally bear the world as an eternal burden, but to probe the infinite experience of inhabiting it. They exist in a state of permanent suspension, trapped within a different temporality, without narrative resolution: they wait, contain, construct. Each element seems not to dwell within a clearly defined territory, but rather to exist in a condition of transit between subject and object, abstraction and figuration, repetition and variation.
It is precisely through rituals of repetition and rhythm that the artist grants materiality to this technicolor world of wax, oil, and flour. Traces of a nearly culinary material density emerge through looping brushstrokes, applied in a meditative process until the desired consistency, glazes, textures, and colors are achieved. Remove and apply, remove and apply, as though persistence itself could guarantee continuity. A reminder that the journey is what gives meaning to the world we construct, and that sometimes remaining in a liminal zone may present itself as a more exciting (and perhaps safer) option than crossing the finish line. A lookout point from which to momentarily escape the horrors of global reality on this side of the door, while waiting for something better on the other side. Or at least to imagine a place where everything is still taking shape, still finding its place. Or one in which, as in the Aleph, all times and all places occur simultaneously.
Beyond a formal or aesthetic representation of a world, these paintings attempt to describe the texture of human experience and to reflect not so much on the ever-relevant question of “who we are,” but on how we insert ourselves into our shifting realities—at times excessive and violent. They ask how the outside and the inside might affect one another in less discordant ways. They speak of traces and material memory, of what remains and what is lost, of the uncanny, and of the promise of other worlds that are more harmonious and interconnected.
- Tania Ragasol
