Este hilo va a tomar la forma de todo lo que devora

What is non-form? That is the question that leads and structures Daniela Libertad’s research. Through various categories of inquiry, she is able to contain the discrepancies of her own stance. Fully aware that the thought of non-form is problematic from the start, she understands that processes of reflection and conceptualization entail a relationship between order, context, abstraction, limit, and system.

Libertad poses the question of how to produce an investigation about the incorporeal, the ungraspable, that which cannot be conferred form but is still perceptible. When the notion of limit disintegrates, what can be and what cannot be perceived in disintegration itself? How can we contemplate the possibility of non-form? Where can we find non-form?

The series Sin título, 2018 (Untitled, 2018), consists of drawings made with colored pencil in 122×149 cm format. In these, the idea of surface and the scope of form are problematized. The direct precursor of this work can be found in two previous series of drawings, Formas y color, 2016 (Forms and Color, 2016) and Paisajes, 2017 (Landscapes, 2017). In those series, the use of color and forms is diffuse, dimensions vanish, and the definition of landscape becomes abstract. Surface and line play with each other, but the latter does not build forms––rather atmospheres, and at the same time provokes questions such as: Where are the limits of the drawing? What happens inside and what happens outside? What is it that we do not see?

In this series, Daniela Libertad acknowledges the tensions and contradictions intrinsic to the articulation of image and representation. In doing so, hegemonic patterns and visual forms that demarcate the expression of that which is represented are rendered formless and deconstructed by means of repetition. Lack of form must not be conceived as the opposite of form, but as a possibility that functions at the very core of form in order to erode it from within. The repetitive gesture that produces layer upon layer, turns the superposition of each spiral imperceptible. We no longer have any certainty of dealing with one color, or rather, with the combination of all colors originating a perceived chaos.

Coined by Bataille in 1929, the formless, is a term that Rosalind Krauss retrieves and conceives not as a concept or condition, but as a performative occurrence. Insofar as its root of creation lies in disorder and non-identity, the formless has the capacity both to represent and to act upon that which is represented. That is to say, not only blurs the structure of form, but also acts upon it to dismember and vanish it.

In order to bring form into question, we must challenge it, reinvent it, criticize it and experience it. Therefore, Daniela Libertad’s formless drawings constitute not only an act whereby movement becomes palpable and the path of lines generating or degenerating the surface becomes visible, but also a critical process on the limits of form. Furthermore, in the sculpture Ensayo sobre circunferencia 17, 2019 (Essay on Circumference 17, 2017), the action of winding a thread over and over as if it were drawn on the surface of something not yet formed, brings us back to the process and the performative act of experimentation. This is a piece in which the possibility of form is always within reach, a circumference without tension hanging from the ceiling, apparently sagging. Libertad writes about this piece: the sculpture mirrors an eating boa —the thread envelops a wire, the wire is any cow, any horse, any animal or person that the boa can eat, and this thread will take the form of everything that devours.