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Mallarmé – Le Silence, le mystère précipité, 2005

Mallarmé – The Silence, the Hasty Mistery, 2005
Painting, 146 x 105 cm

In 1985, in a tribute concert to the Dadaist Cabaret Voltaire, a multidisciplinary musician whose name is unknown and goes by the handle of Tres (three, being the date of his birth), decided to dedicate all his work to the poetics of silence. Since then, in sound performances, manipulated objects and guerrilla installations, silence has been used as absence, as protest and as language. With references such as visual artists James Lee Byars and Joseph Beuys, musicians such as  John Cage, poets such as William S. Burroughs and Stéphane Mallarmé, and theorists such as Susan Sontag, Tres creates silence. Among his more intimate actions, he emptied copies of a newspaper by piercing its pages with tiny holes, printed an H (a silent letter in Spanish) with an ink stamp, turned a pair of scissors into a tool to cut the silence, and wrote in Braille a verse from Mallarmé's poem A throw of the dice will never abolish chance on a portrait of the poet. ‘In a verbally incontinent society, there is no room for silence’, argues Tres.


Technical details

Original title:
Mallarmé – Le Silence, le mystère précipité
Registration number:
5840
Artist:
Tres
Date created:
2005
Date acquired:
2020
Fonds:
MACBA Collection. MACBA Foundation
Object type:
Painting
Media:
Gesso and acrylic on perforated paper
Dimensions:
146 x 105 cm (height x width)
Room:
Meier Building, Level 1
Credits:
MACBA Collection. MACBA Foundation
Copyright:
© Tres
It has accessibility resources:
No

The MACBA Collection features Catalan, Spanish and international art and, although it includes works from the 1920s onwards, its primary focus is on the period between the 1960s and the present.

For more information on the work or the artist, please consult MACBA's Library. To request a loan of the work, please write to colleccio [at] macba.cat.

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