Friedrich Nietzsche dijo que “la persona erudita es una auténtica paradoja: por todas partes se enfrenta a los problemas más horribles, pasea junto a abismos y recoge una flor para contar sus filamentos”. Él sabía que el conocimiento era una fuerza de invocación, algo con un centro oscuro y una atracción gravitacional capaz de destruir nuestra apreciación de la realidad tal como es.

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Acosado por este abismo desde todos los frentes, el pintor Louis Jacquot, para su exposición Tántalo en la Biblioteca Vasconcelos, ha suspendido sus obras entre las estanterías flotantes y los pasillos de la biblioteca. El dramático diseño de la institución hace que el peso del conocimiento y del texto que lo transmite parezcan ilimitados e infinitos, una oportunidad que el galerista Cy Schnabel supo reconocer para el artista, organizando que las pinturas de Jacquot fueran sujetadas con bridas a las barandillas y a las estanterías suspendidas, ocultas y dispersas por todo el complejo laberíntico.

Jacquot las ha colgado de tal manera que nunca es posible ver más de cuatro de las veinte pinturas al mismo tiempo. En cambio, el espectador se ve obligado a deambular para encontrar los puntos de vista que permiten contemplar la exposición a través de corredores y ángulos oblicuos. La búsqueda en sí misma constituye una combinación perfecta, una metonimia física que hace explícitos los paralelismos entre las redes de información que Jacquot distribuye a través de la pintura y el archivo de información que representa el espacio físico de la biblioteca; los corredores materiales evocan la capacidad de las pinturas de Jacquot para procesar y fragmentar la mnemósine cultural.

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The paintings are roughly the size of a body. Their soft-cornered edges mimic the shape of Jacquot’s Moleskine notebook pages. Jacquot doesn’t apply their soft blue color but instead sources the material from French fabric stores. Both of these decisions fix the paintings within the context of readymades, as Jacquot chose to annotate a cultural signifier of color and material over personal expression. This sets up the paintings as direct and relational to cultural signification and, with the golden ratio of the Moleskine, presents each painting as chapters or hyperlinks. But they are not just archival semiotics because of their material and the way that Jacquot layers resin and reflective paint onto the soft blue of the fabric. The paintings shift dramatically over the course of the day. At times, they warm up from the cross-light of the late-afternoon sun. At others, they become translucent, or fully opaque and dark. Depending on your angle to them, they eclipse into dark objects, or they reflect your image as you walk past them. Each experience is unique.

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Jacquot works in series—a painter interested in paintings’ ability to be implicated with networks and systems of knowledge, recalling what David Joselit contextualized in “Painting Beside Itself” as transitive painting—painting that acknowledges and is generated from the context of its circulation and interpretation. Jacquot approaches painting through the systems it can generate, a non-language that is adjacent to language in its formations of networks. The paintings don’t aestheticize knowledge but instead keep information and our access to ideas at a distance and within the realm of abstraction. For Jacquot, this means annotating inaccessible bibliographies. Painting for Jacquot is, unavoidably, an act of poetic mistranslation. The systems are broken links that originate an excess of sensuous misdirection. In some cases, the references lead back to themselves. In the works Ximena, Mirela, Soren and Elias (all 2026), Jacquot mirrors the same image, reflecting or copying each movement twice so that they index the others’ negative.

Jean-François Lyotard referred to the element of painting that cannot be understood or articulated in language—the inexpressable. It came from his belief that we can never truly share the same experience of a painting. Our eyes begin in different places. Our bodies and sight lines approach from different angles. At best, we can perceive our own vantage and try to close the gap through inadequate language. Jacquot’s exhibition makes this realization into a perceptible drama. The experience of seeing works during the cool light of the morning or the warmer light of the afternoon makes paintings flicker in and out of being noticed.

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Jacquot is engaged in the painting of the morphological images, as what Aby Warburg might refer to as the psycho-historian, which saw images as a series of translations through culture. Jacquot applies this morphology to the density of the library’s knowledge, obscuring images into abstraction and oblivion so that they exist as forces of light and shadow. The paintings of these deferred images create a strobe-sense, a flickering of our perception with them that mimics the aleatory nature of us grasping at information in an increasingly screen-based world. There is a lingering sadness to the exhibition, an intimation that both paintings and the physical representation of libraries are the holdouts to an increasingly immaterial world. Tantalus was the Greek son of Zeus who was punished by being made to stand chin deep in a lake of water, going hungry and thirsty while surrounded by food and drink. The paintings utilize the images of the library while surrounded by its information, but taking it further, the title of the exhibition might suggest that painting is surrounded by knowledge without ever being able to adequately relay it. Painting is not a language, or a medium that passes along information. Instead, the more it attempts such things, the more it gets caught up in its own forms of intelligence and mystery.