Relying frequently on foundational works of universal literature, the Mexican artist Jorge Méndez Blake (b. 1974) deepens his understanding of the contemporary world, choosing as the point of departure for this exhibition Before the law, a chapter from Franz Kafka’s The trial. He relies on it in an architectural sense, just as an arch rests on a column. Méndez Blake uses literature as raw material to elaborate, even to inhabit, a place. The interplay between literary practice (reading and writing) and architecture is one of the distinctive features of his work. For Inside the law, his fifth solo exhibition at the gallery, he makes a direct reference to the parable recounted by an abbot to Josef K., the famous protagonist of The trial.

This allegory is the story of a man who stands before the door of the Law and who, prevented, or rather, left unaided by the doorkeeper, never crosses its threshold, even though it was destined for him, and him alone. Starting from this passage, which remains widely commented on without ever having been explained by Kafka (let us not forget that almost all of his writings were meant to be destroyed after his death had his executor not decided to preserve and publish them...), Méndez Blake draws up a polyphonic exhibition made up of writings, paintings, sculptures, drawings, and a video.

By breaking free from Kafka’s text, Méndez Blake stages works that we cannot avoid contextualizing and interpreting today from a political, ethical, or moral point of view. The idea is not so much to interpret Kafka as to forge links between a story written over a century ago and a current situation that clearly bears the scars of absurdity, injustice, confinement, outrageous power, and tyranny.

In the room on the right, a wall is covered with paintings depicting short texts, disjointed sentences, and chaotic grammar. The sentences are made up of interchangeable words that sometimes verge on incomprehension. Interpretation, in general, is always subject to a multiplicity of viewpoints. Could this be a metaphor for the effort required to understand the Other? The sentences might be trivial or mere stylistic exercises, but as the visitor reads them, they realize they all allude to the notion of a wall. “A wall contains a universe,” “The ocean is a wall,” “A book can destabilize a wall,” “A wall has neither beginning nor end”... The wall is one of the essential elements of human constructions. Yet it both divides and protects. It is a dividing line that plays on the notion of boundary, outside and inside, public and private. A mundane construction in one sense, it can prove extremely divisive and become charged with military, ideological, religious, and other tensions. Current events shamefully remind us all of this.

Facing the “wall of paintings,” two deceptively monochrome paintings incorporate the complete, albeit illegible (and translated into English), text of Before the Law, while a sculpture on a mirrored plinth shows the fragility of any encounter. The two screens in this room show a video of a woman’s hand relentlessly pounding a metal door. This violent, noisy gesture signals injustice or urgency. The ambiguity is heightened by the slightly offset temporality of the two videos. It is the gesture of someone locked in, urgently asking to be let out, or of someone who wants to get in urgently. In either case, it is someone wanting to be heard and asking for the door to be opened. Indirectly, this video evokes the notion of limit and of territory, of the private and the public, of freedom and of confinement.

In the left-hand room, the visitor is almost prevented from entering by a tall, heavy and well-anchored cylindrical structure made of bi-colored bricks. There is an absurdity reinforced by its circularity and the impossibility of entering or accessing the interior of this construction. Could we then say that it is a monument? But what is a monument if not a structure intended for remembrance, for memory, erected to remind us of something or someone that must not be forgotten? Yet here, at first glance, the structure seems confined to an absurd and useless role. Is it a fortress? A prison? However, on closer inspection, we can see a small piece of paper slipped between the bricks on which we can read “every wall can be torn down”. A monument reminding us that it can be reduced to dust. An absurd construction that speaks of its own disappearance.

Circling the structure, a series of drawings recalls the guiding figure of this exhibition: a portrait of Kafka, partly mute, with half his face erased, first shown bare-headed and then, in another drawing, wearing a hat. Other drawings show delimited spaces, seemingly suspended, subtitled with texts describing the space of the Law. The concepts of confinement, separation and isolation are reinforced by the madness of the Kafkaesque litany “There he sits for days and years,” maniacally repeated in a polyptych carefully typed on a typewriter.

Questions of power, hierarchy, and absurd dialogue are raised in the back room in a series of works on paper. Composed by the artist, these dialogues take place in a prison for poets. They evoke repression, memory, the passage of time (“What will you do in the prison ruins?”), linguistics, the condition of human powerlessness in the face of injustice (“The law has no entrance”), and more. Confronting these sometimes absurd and often disturbing statements, an installation unfolds, composed of 400 balls of crumpled paper (which are in fact sheets of aluminum) reproducing the last page of an unfinished poem by the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy.

This work, entitled From an unfinished poem, is as much an allusion to the doubt that plagues every artist and the potential inability to complete a work as it is a reference to censorship and the desire of certain powers to prevent people from reading and thinking for themselves. In turn, it raises again the question of the fate and posthumous publication of Kafka’s writings. On the one hand, many works in the exhibition put in perspective the notion of limits; on the other hand, this work plays on the idea of a place constantly open, without borders or boundaries, which metaphorically could be perceived as the realm of imagination itself. Imagination, the pillar of thought, must be cherished tirelessly. It is through constant thinking and rethinking that human beings can accept themselves and welcome their fellow human beings. It is therefore not illogical to conclude this text with the three bronze door knockers which, by the crossing of a threshold, question the notions of visiting the Other and of physically entering an Elsewhere. That the boundary (the door, the wall) should be the end of something goes without saying, but it must also be seen as the beginning of something else.

Through Inside the law, Méndez Blake shows that art can be seen as a sanctuary, a place of refuge. He also reminds us of the untenable situation of being kept apart from one’s own life, and therefore from one’s own place, like the man in Kafka’s parable. In order to live in harmony with the world, it is imperative not to shut oneself up within the narrow limits of the self, but to rethink common space and the sharing of territory. And this is where the paradox lies: while it is important to build together, and therefore to erect walls, it is equally necessary to tear them down in order to welcome the Other into one’s home and to restore the noble concept of hospitality.

(Text by Olivier Meessen)