What place does the curve, and not the circle, have in geometry? How do we design our built environment through curves? The German geometer Ludwig Burmester is acknowledged as the first person to conceive a scientific system to design curves and elliptical forms. Based on mathematical studies, in the late-nineteenth century he conceived the first stencils for drawing curves, which were later popularized by Faber Castell.

Burmester’s principles were used in engineering until the 1960s when the French engineer Pierre Bézier conceived a CAD computer programming system which was successfully applied in aeronautics and automobiles. And while Bézier worked for Renault, another Frenchman, Paul de Casteljau, worked for the competition, Citroën. And so aerodynamic engineering discovered in the curve its own particular modern (and Barthesian) mythology.

Curves in roads started to be designed at the same time as, in art, the language of abstraction adopted the curve. The apparently random curves in Brazilian Neo-Concrete art, for instance in Lygia Pape, indicate modulations and fluctuations, compensations, organic rhythms between the open and the closed that arise from the melodic elongation of the line.

Before numeric programming, artisans were faced with a technical challenge when curves were added to a material like glass. The modern material par excellence, glass is always limiting; the glass inside public buses adopts forms that, far from casual, speak of the uses and separations of bodies in space; physical barriers, visual boundaries, grids, that delimit the gaze and the edges between inside and outside. Other glass screens, this time tactile, are an interface between the physical and the virtual worlds. Paradoxically, when they crack in the form of a spider’s web they embody their own function in the net.

This exhibition by Xabier Salaberria speaks of all this without doing so explicitly, without actually referring to it. The qualities of his practice for which he is known all converge here: sculpture, design, display, handcraft techniques … coming together in silent forms and silhouettes that express a content housed in the forms themselves. Blurring the separation in the work of art between content (what is within the frame) and container (the frame itself, the framing and the transparent protection), these works turn the transparency of glass into both material and subject matter, bringing into play a game and a relationship, a resistance between the material and the tool. The hand (the tool) wishes to submit the material and its whimsical fragility. Docility and resistance are two attributes of all manual craft.

In addition, the works on exhibit here recall a landscape still present on the city outskirts: industrial decadence that announces the current post-industrial order in abandoned buildings with their shattered glass “sheets” (given their fragile thinness) conjure up arbitrary forms in the imagination. These factories that refuse to go away because their disappearance testifies to the end of the mythical period of modernism.

More than a tribute to the virtues of the transparent curtain wall advocated by the Bauhaus and its acolytes, in this exhibition by Salaberria glass is synonymous with disruption and protest. A sensitive, difficult material. The object of acts of vandalism or the plain and simple libidinal channelling of rage. Beyond the tragic associations of “broken glass”, it is also a material for art. We could think for instance of Window Blow Up (1976) by Gordon Matta-Clark, shooting at the windows of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York as a form of protest against the institutionality of architecture only to then, after the director, Peter Eisenman, repaired them immediately, cover the windows of the official institute for city planning with photos of broken windows in the Bronx. Or the critical knowing nod of the Mexican artist Jorge Satorre —Salaberria’s fellow artist here at the gallery— to Matta-Clark’s work through a re-enactment made in an abandoned house in Cork in 2005.

This exhibition includes Gestalts, silhouettes of broken windows taken, for example, from a photograph by Matta-Clark; another is the broken glass of a photograph by Brassaï; others are invented by Salaberria, all drawn using the logiciel invented by Bézier. There are resting and superimposed glasses, like the remains of protections for artworks which, following an accident, have decided to emancipate themselves from what they protected in order to attach themselves once again to the frames. There is, to conclude, a weft of conscious and unconscious relationships, limits and gentle provocations that stimulate the gaze and contact with the observer.

Peio Aguirre