“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word will be for the rest of the times,” says Iván Capote’s gospel. That is the reason why his artistic legacy is summed up in the aggression to writing, and his complaint as primary instrument of cultural indoctrination, of subjugation and violence, of homicide: because of the word millions of men have died in mass, while others have killed millions, when some dictated it, made other many millions prostrate before it; not in vain the word is today the strongest weapon, used by mankind for self-control.
In artistic terms, Capote belongs to the reflection zone inaugurated by the kind of conceptualism that approaches the most to the analysis of the constituent linguistic material of human culture. That is why he identifies the story as the structural basis of reason, and therefore, as the zone worth attacking in order to undo the power system that articulates humanity’s cultural behaviors. That is the reason why he presents the word as an artificial and inert body, naked and susceptible to interpretations and investitures. Either through the use of paper or bronze, the letters come together in a sense of installation, sketching their supposed guilt in an out-of-time reality in which we do not know yet if the crimes imputed to their power have been already committed or forgotten.
But in every one of Capote’s artworks the word is devoid of phonetic entity and its materiality is the writing. Thus the word appears as a law, the first and irreplaceable story. In addition, he puts the impending presence of the enunciating figure, the creator and the power sideways. The word is the word of God and the evidence of His regency, even more, it replaces Him.
With a minimal sense, shared between sculpture and installation, he creates springs for the viewer to go further in the more intricate areas of contemporary culture. The personification of the Word turns out to be pop, as well as its transformation into organism, its cold and snooty enlivening and its sophisticated construction. His behavior is impeccable.
The shrouded bodies of the Word lay covered with bronze, carved in wood or cut out in paper; thus he has created the anti-Christ of writing, of story, of power and of human submission. All of our history is anchored to it: we are, in principle, Word. Will we be also Word at the end? So cold and distant, as impersonal as universal, Iván Capote’s trails foreshadow the possibility of a fair consideration in what we have reached as civilization, and what still remains for us to be.
