Time, Language, Trace, Action
2024
Soil and Tree Rubbings (soil, grass, and bark on paper)
14 x 17 inches, each

The series of works that comprises this installation were created in the first months of 2024 during my explorations of some Los Angeles parks (Griffith Park, Wildwood Canyon, and Brand Park). Traces of my thinking, each “drawing/action” locates itself within the unfillable space between my “umwelt” and the reality we live in, the earth we walk on, the environment that envelopes us.

Themselves geographies torn from the earth, these works are an encounter between the time of my existence and the time that has sculpted the shape of the tree trunk and the soil, the history behind them. The result is a record of these different layers of time, where the marks made through my movements are themselves a direct fragment of the temporality of the elements, and not a representation of it. They exist because I exist, they exist because the earth exists and I live in it, and they aim to be an expression/record of that and only that. All the “personal and subjective choices” are cut out, the human action and decision (art) is brought down to the bare essentials, yet it still influences the outcome of the creation. Consciously, I gave up control over the colors, the forms, the marks, and the signs, yet my movement is still completely subjective and autobiographical. This action is a re-examination of the human act of drawing/painting (which is here a symbol for art created by a human being), made without the traditional tools of expressions (pencils, brushes or actual colors), and it questions our means of artistic language, repurposing the basic inquiries: what is art? Why do we need it? The results trick the viewer into seeing a painting, which does not exist: the work itself is the performance which made it and created it, an “action painting” that uses the experience of reality (in this case the most basic reality, nature) as the material and the performance itself.

A Vocabulary of a Void
Francesca Virginia Coppola’s Soil and Tree Rubbings
Text by Saun Santipreecha

One of the earliest works I discovered of Francesca’s was her collection of tree and soil rubbings. Even before reading the titles and descriptions, there was something very poignant and moving about the works for me, visually, the movement, the tension between mark and absence. Discovering the process in which these works were made only amplified their physical manifestation as embodiments of not only temporality but also of the void between two subjects, two surfaces, between self and the world, between the internal and the external. The works themselves are the marks of the void between the two. Indeed, the practice itself is embodied in this way. Francesca does not ‘see’ visibly the marks she is making but rather feels it from the other side of the paper—the white void—as we all do from within our own, feeling, gesturing, clambering towards the Other—towards an/other—in order to ‘speak’, in order to ‘hear’ what or who speaks back.

These works, themselves traces of a performance, once arranged in a structural form upon a wall as in this installation, form a vocabulary of this action, of this longing, this reaching out, blind yet seeing, sensing. And just as language itself is trace, these works themselves form language, a non-verbal one whose vocabulary acts more as music does, whose symbolic system is external to itself, is never knowable the way human language can be: via its internal symbolic system. There is something abject as much as graceful in this action, desperate yet restrained and elegant. Taken singularly, they are frames of a dismembered film that we cannot watch. Taken together, they speak, they voice a vocabulary of a void embodying the physicality between the inner and the outer, between performance and the performed, between perception and the perceived.