A composer of traces, an iconographer of musics, a painter of poems, an allegorist of politics, a South American expressionist monster with something of a Japanese alchemist involved in anarchitecture, a walkscaper of Yugoslav histories, a fervent gardener of fragments.
This is how Francisco Tomsich, a 41 -year old multidisciplinary artistborn in Uruguay, presents himself poetically.
During his residency at MGLC Ljubljana, Francisco worked on the series of 12 portraits on paper and mirrors in silkscreen titled Signs for Those Who Are Far Away.
The art project is a multimedia essay on friendship and distance based on extended portraiture practices and developed through an experimental approach to printmaking.
For the artist, distance is a constitutive element of friendship. This is what he says:
At the beginning of my practice, portrait-making was always related to friendship and love. Later, it became an arena for making art history discourses clash with actual material conditions of production. Later still, it became a function, central to my practice but somehow displaced from the centre at the same time. It's still like that: portrait-making can be a source of images and sometimes a story in itself, but most frequently it's a territory of communication, exchange and collaboration, a strategy for knowing somebody better, an impulse to get to know somebody, a way of starting a conversation and get a story. A geography. Songs. A departure. A relic.
To develop the project, he invited about 20 friends who live far away (including Mexico DF, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Skopje, Belgrade, Hamburg and Bologna) to pose for a portrait via Zoom, Google Meet, WhatsApp and Viber. All these poses replicated the same position. The sessions were projected on a wall, and coal and acrylic-based drawings were produced live during the posing. If everything went well, the final portrait would be done over the film used to expose the silkscreen, in order to avoid, from then on, any intrusion of computer-generated images in the process. All these drawings and sketches, as well as the prints done upon them, keep a similar scale, roughly 1 to 1. Editions of prints on paper and mirror were done upon a selection of works that ended up being acceptable drawings and good portraits at the same time. The mirrors, at the end, are exhibited as supports and sources of light projections and multi-layered exercises on reflection.
During the residency, the artist produced some additional works (drawings, paintings, texts, videos), which are in dialogue with the prints. He also did many activities and events. He carried out three very amusing workshops for school children, in which they were playing with the artist's idea of portraiture, printing and reflections. He had an Open Studio Day and a music performance featuring a portrait of his friend from Uruguay - composer Vladimir Guicheff Bogacz. At the end of his residency he invited locals to attend the cooking session and socialise in the intimacy of his residential apartment at Švicarija art centre.
Residency dates: 1-25 November 2022
Born in Uruguay in 1981, Francisco Tomsich is an artist and an author who graduated from the Faculty of Humanities in Montevideo. Since 2003, he has produced exhibitions, publications, stage works, research models and educational tools, working with different media, languages and tongues. He has co-founded and integrated many non-disciplinary artist associations in South America and Europe and participated in the 7th MERCOSUR Biennial (2009) and the 1st Montevideo Biennial (2012). Tomsich moved to Slovenia in 2014. Between 2014 and 2019, he was actively engaged in working with refugee and migrant communities in Slovenia and the Balkan region. He lives and works in Izola, Slovenia.
http://anticlimacus.wordpress.com
Pop-up presentation of Francisco Tomsich artwork. Photo by Urška Boljkovac.
