Anish Kapoor, who realizes a minimalist imagination with passion, is like a mysterious hunter of truth who continually manipulates reality through an artistic approach shaped by a psychoanalytic determination and the insight that develops in accordance with it. To give an example, the arrangement titled All of Nothing, installed at monumental scale within a confined space, creates a collective aura of nothingness structured within an imagistic opposition and stacking up realities. Here we are confronted with a monumental waste/body simulation evoking all bodily fluids, blood above all. (1)

Made using a red PVC membrane, All of Nothing possesses an effect of mass beyond sculpture, in which a heavily laden fluid, blood, a deadly pleasure, drawn out of life, is imprisoned between floor and ceiling. It is approached, first of all, from a perspective that differentiates the space, and it is the product of a representational thinking experience that encompasses the integral nature of soul and body. Looking, in this context, at his earlier projects, we can see that red, here too, permeates the surface of the balloon forms as a fragment of fantastical desire. The hollow monumental mass, meanwhile, becomes an object, figuratively scaled beyond measure, in which nothingness is stored. Such arrangements, realized in accordance with a psychological paradigm referring to the body, must therefore be regarded as formal correlates developed in relation to the destructive, irreconcilable condition of a traumatic age. (2)

elliptical sacs of fluid-blood, harboring the waste of the soul, appearing as though about to burst at any moment

In All of Nothing, where Kapoor’s intervention into emptiness becomes a postmodern game, it is evident that a complex motivation is generated through a directly established perception of the body. Here, above all, within an emptiness that wraps around a central narrative and turns into an intellectual diagram, monumental balloon forms, standing taut within a compressed order that interrogates conflicting concepts such as violence, desire, freedom and death, are turned into images of truth. Moreover, these elliptical sacs of fluid-blood, harboring the waste of the soul, have evolved into monumental forms of dark matter, full of secrets on account of accumulated sensitivities referring to social violence, and appearing as though about to burst at any moment.

It is, moreover, all the more interesting that this strange and uncanny imagination of Kapoor’s meets an inquiry proceeding through a symbolic, non-compliant embodiment and through extraordinary psychological arguments. In this context, All of Nothing, as part of a catastrophobic image order, compresses the space and stands before us as the conception of an unexplored inner realm, one that harbors within it the destructive spirit of the age and can, in essence, be shaken by delicate vibrations. There is no doubt that such individual analyses, bearing on social devastation, traumatic collapse and absence, can be said to generate, through Kapoor’s disruptive narratives harboring a mysterious political spirit, an effective plane of objection to the prevailing and widespread perception of reality.

an estranged image turned into an act of contemplation

In his recent work, Anish Kapoor is in fact producing deviant, chronic landscapes, integrated with imaginary pleasure and excess, that deny a conventional order and carry it into marginal dimensions within a confined space. Led by a divergent psychology and setting the residues of the unconscious in motion, this strange approach establishes what amounts to a psychoanalytic assembly line through the powerful presence of abject objects within the space, and creates a field of experience that activates new connections awaiting discovery. All of Nothing, in this context, turns, through its red elliptical objects, into a universe of life dominated by the global system, and creates an unsettling heterotopic space liberated by a knife-edge imagination. Here Kapoor creates his own psychic universe through an apparatus in which utopian sentiments are concentrated, touching, within a metaphysical fiction beyond time, slippery and rounded image-objects, and bringing forth the pathological dimensions of reality through a ceremonial approach. Here the image is estranged and turned into an act of contemplation, and, exceeding the limits of a gaze directed at perception, it discusses, under the guidance of an anarchist imaginative power, a problematic of comprehension bearing vital importance, by way of this red imagery. In this magical monumental landscape, accordingly, a great many material and spiritual things are refused, compressed or abandoned.

Ultimately, Kapoor is engaged in an interesting and exploratory experience, laden with metaphors, in which he articulates the holistic meanings carried by minimal elliptical object-images in accordance with a fantastical desire for form, and examines them through a vague and radical alterity. It is, at the same time, an attitude of challenge that continually and repeatedly reconstructs his gaze toward the object-things he turns into an ironic narrative, by setting in motion a synthesizing power grounded in causality…