During his stay in Santa Croce sull’Arno, José Yaque’s attention was captured by several elements that seemed expressive of certain themes and recalled his search at the same time. The first of these was the river: always true to itself but always changing on its unceasing flow to the sea. Yaque sees in the river the prime metaphor that informs this entire body of work but before that the philosophical key through which Man’s lives and actions may be read: you never bathe in the same river twice because it’s always different water. The two moments of bathing are also different, and are, continuously changing and evolving in the meantime. For the artist, the only element of continuity in the history of civilization is the continuous and unceasing flow of life, which is always different and read in their being a people, being part of a whole that is slowly, like the river, flowing. For Yaque, mutability is the phenomenological element most worthy of study, analysis, and depiction. Everything changes, but the changing of appearance is paradoxically its constant characteristic. With this key to reading in hand, his experience at Waste Recycling was fundamental in constructing through human activity technology, research, and the visualization of this metaphor: piles of industrial waste sorted by material stacked in the storage yard for varyingly brief periods of time before being continuously depleted and then built again with the arrival of new material. The residue of human activities is interpreted in its continuous decomposition and re-composition in the same way as the incessant flowing of the river that bespeaks the activities of human beings and the things they consume and abandon at the same time. The visit to the Aquarno water treatment plant and the processing cycle that returns tanning waste water first to the Usciana Canal then to the Arno river once purified provided the artist with yet another building block in his construction and verification of an imaginary world founded on the circularity of the movement of things, water, materials, energy.
Devenir VI, 2014, charcoal on paper 75 x 84 cm
Courtesy: GALLERIA CONTINUA, San Gimignano / Beijing / Les Moulins / Habana
Photo by: ©Yaque