Pedro Tudela's work requires an exchange that is not necessarily coherent but retroactive with two other practitioners of the reversible journey between body and machine, between the production of sensitivity through unfathomable technological processes and the “macaque of technicality” that the artistic monomania incessantly problematic in the liminal preciousness of the infantile (of the desire without guilt) and the esoteric (of the apparent seriousness that the incomprehensible lends to aesthetic signs); they are two other authors, who have disappeared, who made their operations and in resulting products (works, projects, actions to socialize difference and strangeness) the possibility of “getting closer to what doesn't agree with each other”, the possibility of “a heteroclite geometry” as Michel Foucault says in another context. They are Francis Picaria (1879–1953) and Elezard Lissitzky (1890–1941). (...)

From the first, I highlight the way in which he transformed the cubist and ontologically Cezannian obsession with the “passage” into an anti-mimetic device where the object dissolves, is disbanded in a continuum that resolves, through tonal redundancy, (and the optical scarcity that is entailed) the problem of representing the “space that exists between things”; the “between two” as Georges Braque said, where the subject is located in relation to the object and these two in relation to the world that contains them. I refer specifically to his painting from the period of the Puteaux group, and the friendship with Duchamp and Apollinaire, (e.g., La Source, 1912); painting where different tonal layers of brown initiate the pictorial space as something more than the figurative incident of plastic form, but I also refer to the paintings he painted in 1913 in New York (e.g. La ville de New York aperçue à travers le corps) and where he establishes a correspondence between the optical and the haptic in the spatial experience while opening the way for a recomposition I am the founder of the finite place, of The place of disappearance but also of the repositioning of experience (of the “present moment of the past” as Elliot would say), which is art. Where does Pedro Tudela's artistic work fit in the apparent anachronism of this genealogy? Wouldn't it make more sense to bring it closer to another nomenclature derived from Bruce Nauman or from angst, from sacrifice and trauma, from European Fluxus? Perhaps, but this is the easiest resolution of the problem and basically what I want to emphasize is that the edge of the labyrinth, where the image initially appears as the codification of otherness, as in the industrial street of the poem Zone by Apollinaire, reaches the other side, and it is no longer the relationship between the support and the surface of the image that matters. The juxtaposition of contrasts is now taking place in space in the same way that the risen Christ, the Christ Icarus from the Poem Zone, confronts the airplane: in the place of exit where Pedro Tudela is found, belief (in what is not We did it believe, in the duty to be of art) and logocentrism (the daily reality of being in repetition as a substitute for the universal, of daring to be) interchange. To the perplexity of this anachronism, I reply that Pedro Tudela's work fits in the methodological neighborhood, in the way in which it replaced the materiality of the pictorial medium, ink, in its oscillation between a solid and liquid character (between a use and a criticism of use), with the inhuman and anti-mimetic condition of sound; and he made this replacement, too, to speak of this “space that exists between things” and the semantic and poetic accumulation that this region of being and consciousness provides; his body of work was thinking and problematizing) through the sound of scale of the body in space. Sound appears as a spatial property, like the corridor of an immaterial transit between the visible and the visual; in many of the experiences, the sound surface functions as the kinetic dimension of the invisible part of space. On other occasions his work tests the penetrability of emptiness through a syntax made of silence and non-silence. Then this neighborhood moves to the unheimlich (the strange familiar) of technology through the mechanomorphs produced by Picabia during the Great War, especially in New York, and of which his Parade Amoureuse of 1917 is a strong image; I can relate them, in appropriation, in anthropogenesis, with Pedro Tudela's collection of metaobjects, forms that create their own content from the point of view of production (and which are the reflection of a creative autonomy that is also linked to that other being that practices, reverts and transforms Mimese daily - what we once were and that we can no longer be. A being whose external reality is the artistic work). And we have another of Pedro Tudela's ancestors: Lissitszky, who in his self-portrait, The Builder (1924), places one of his hands, his “monkey hand” as he will say, on his face and in this superposition he invents a new organ, the hand-eye, the eye motor that can fail because he thinks and thinks in order to understand the poetic contours of imperfection, of the inconclusive. This Lissitzky, of the Prouns, of the supremacy of the ambiguous, of the organic, although dressed in technocratic clothing, can be seen, in the pages of the magazine G, by Hans Richter, his concerns regarding the utilitarian machinism of the 1st Constructivist Group reverberate as a “different gift” in Pedro Tudela's sound machines, in the stereophonic implants. Lissitzky also reappears through the push and pull between the expectant and participant condition he attributes to the spectator in his installations; in a letter to his wife Sophie Lissitzky-Kupers, and regarding a set of photographs she had sent him of Mondrian's project, “Madame B.'s Salon”, (an order from the collector Ida Bienert), Lissitzky commented that he seemed to have erected an abstract still life designed to be observed through the keyhole. In the layout of the domestic space, Mondrian emphasized logos where aesthetic control of the eye predominated. The photographs that Michel Seuphor took of Mondrian's Parisian studio in 1930 reiterate this increase in inhabited (and used) space as pictorial support designed to be totaled, contemplated from a specific place. The author pre-determines what will be seen, when and how this ocularity is performed. On the other hand, Lissitzky's pictorial-architectural interfaces explore the immersion of the spectator; in the Kabinett der Abstrakten (1927–28) that he built at the Hanover Museum, the spectator is inside the work deciding what to look at and confronting the asymmetry and mobility of space (in the composition and scale of the pictorial objects, in the materiality of the removable walls) and the walls have ceased their static condition as resting places of the pictorial, as stated in the magazine G as functioning reverberations. The walls are not comforting but they exist in alterity. The sound and plastic atmospheres with which Pedro Tudela has been developing his relationship with the exhibition space are an extension of that culture of trial and error where the entire exhibition is the studio's main work and is also the construction of situations (ambiguous, without connection, useless, without predictability) provided by the combination of displacement (space) and duration (time) in the depth of sound.

Pedro Pousada
Coimbra, March 2014