En el filo de la navaja - Enric Llorach

En el filo de la navaja is a book made with fondness, above all with attachment to objects –to certain objects- and to their images. With the aim of revising the episodes in which art and architecture intermix with special intensity, Enric Llorach resorts to the figure of anachronism as an approximation and analysis tool. A concept rescued by George Didi-Huberman for writing history, anachronism refers to the intrusion of one time into another, and amongst the consequences of its value is the legitimation of all the subjectivity that goes between reality and its interpretation, amongst them memory and montage. Once anachronism is admitted, the truth as such –in its most rational and authorised acceptation- loses supremacy and in its place an invitation for dialogue makes way.

Thus, anthropocene is examined placing it in retrospective relation to Gabriele Basilico’s photographs, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty or Gordon Matta-Clark’s perforations. We travel through modern, postmodern and contemporary periods in the hands of photographers and architects like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Le Corbusier, Robert Frank, Aldo Rossi, Jeff Wall and Steven Holl. The concept of mimesis is reworded along with Rosemary Laing, Francesca Woodman, Andrei Tarkovski, Anna and Eugeni Bach and Eduard Bru. The minimalism of Herzog & de Meuron in the nineties is put into context by exploring the influence of Rémy Zaugg’s plastic work in the work of the Swiss architects. From the application of Dalí’s paranoiac-critical method and its delirious interpretation of L’Angélus by Jean-François Millet arises an unexpected formal flow which inundates the work of Rem Koolhaas. Also a bridge between Andy Warhol’s work and the German painter Gerhard Richter is outlined to better understand the work of the British architects Caruso St John and Sergison Bates. Amongst all the crossed illuminations, Le Corbusier emerges as the true protagonist of the book, presenting him as an architect of the anachronistic instead of the blind apostle of modernity we all know.