“All Cretans are liars”: said the Cretan.
It seems quite befitting to use this ancient paradox in relation to the trip and knowingly impossible attempts made by Julio Pastor. One could even reword the paradox as:
“This representation is the truth”: said the representation.
Julio set himself the impossible task of recording the trip in its entirety, from the moment he walked out of his front door in Groningen to the moment the work was to hang on the wall of the exhibition space in Rethymno. Pastor chose to record his trip through whatever means he had at hand: his Polaroid camera, some watercolours, brushes, and an assortment of drawing materials. The only rule was that the registrations had to fit to the piece of thread;the large roll of paper that was to contain the representations of the trip.
Julio began by collecting maps, directions or plans that would locate him to his position. Gathering this material he would then begin the arduous process of transferring the material to the thread. At times formats differed, requiring the artist to resize the maps; rescaling the information from large to small; the trip by rules of composition had to have a pictorial flow.
Julio’s first days consisted of walking and exploring as any traveller, taking in the sites of Rethymno and the island itself. Returning every evening, Julio would set to his task and begin arranging the gathered information, his experiences, drawings and photographs from the day’s events.
The task was laborious, in its construction but also in its sense of chronology, events had to be placed in the right order, sequentially but also pictorially; fitting to prescribed rules of pictorial arrangement; the artist’s own touch. The work was thus not just an archive or a record gathered in the scientific sense but rather a collection pieced together by a painter, by a witness and sole documenter to a series of events.
The piece begins conceptually, but the concept in its very makings knows itself to be impossible, and so with this, quickly moves into a personalized assemblage, morphing into something that by its very multitude becomes unpredictable.
Pastor stuck to his rules, but soon found that the more he witnessed and experienced the further he fell behind in his work. As the days progressed, the walks and explorations of the island decreased till at last the work extended out to include the day; every moment was consumed by the work. The experiences he once enjoyed came to a stop and so his experience was localized to the work. The work thus becoming the world and at last, the work dictating his very experience.
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