Cern II

Between 2012 and 2015, Spanish-born artist Alejandro Guijarro embarked on a project known collectively as ‘Momentum’, which sought to examine – and transcend – the boundaries between the fields of art and science. Travelling to notable quantum mechanics institutions around the world, from Oxford and Cambridge in the UK and CERN in Switzerland, to MIT and UC Berkeley in the USA, Guijarro took a series of life-sized photographs of blackboards etched with a chalky build-up of mathematical equations. The blackboards, photographed with a large-format camera in an emptied lecture hall, are presented face-on: frameless, their roiled, residual surfaces become reminiscent of the mid-century abstract painting of artists such as Cy Twombly or Jackson Pollock. The colourful, smudged and graffiti-like scrawls of Cern I, photographed in 2012, present a visual mind-map that has moved beyond scientific comprehension and into the intangible realms of the purely aesthetic. Like an ancient palimpsest, it hints at an almost mythical wealth of potential discovery and meaning. The dynamic, diagrammatic markings, formed from scuffed chalk and dragged erasers, seem to allude to the expressive power of the individual gesture, moving beyond the limitations of language. That these works are photographs brings additional meanings into play: just as each image records the physical traces of a mental movement – the speed, repetition and emphasis of individual strokes suggesting a particular train of thought or line of questioning – each blackboard becomes a reminder of the inevitability of loss, and regeneration. Smudged and erased after each photograph has been taken, the blackboards are fated to dissolve into empty slates once more.