Unseeing: Yoshua Okón’s Blind Spot 

By Ricardo Pohlenz 

To begin, I would pause for a moment to review the various forms of color blindness—or  rather, its different levels—by treating it as an anomalous condition enabling some people to see  beyond what is conventionally regarded as normal, as defined by the field of vision of so-called  trichromats, which looks like I am taking a stance or imposing my viewpoint. But I think this invitation is still open to those who, after peering at the paintings featured in this show, can  connect this Blind Spot to other kinds of blindness—axiological or axiomatic, partial or chromatic,  as it were—defined by illuminated fields, often indicated by what we want to see or are looking for in the field to which our perception is open. 

I will not belabor the figure of Tiresias, the blind oracle who sees beyond things in  Sophocles’s tragedy, or the legendary blindness of Homer, who stands in for himself, being one and so many other blind people memorizing the verses of an epic tale at a time when there were no  videoscreens, and which we have lost now that we live out our lives walking abstracted into our  screens, attentive to every least gesture, which gets referred to a conditioning and assembled into one code after another. And that’s if we have the codes, or rather, the decoding devices that can  assemble these codes, by which I mean the keys for access to an illumination, to have or to have  found a new meaning for the world and what is hidden from our perception, depending on whether  or not we can gain access its contents. How much can we see of that which is there before our  eyes? How much information can we access simply by contemplating things as they appear, as revealed through the different chemical filters that enable us to translate light into its different  containers? 

Yoshua Okón brought Plato up to me, the fact that we do not see the world as such but only  its appearance, its simulacrum. I can get on board with that appearance alongside the French  phenomenologists; that is, with the appearing of the world and its different substrates a moment before and a moment afterward. I would even go so far as to say that things are only there when  we are saying them; a moment before and a moment afterward they are not there, like an automobile we’ve decided not to notice is on the verge of running us over. Did we decide to overlook  it, or were we unable to see it because it appeared in a blind spot, that zone where—despite our  doubts and reticences—it escapes from the per se of our perception? Is it out of anger or  wonderment that we resign ourselves to not seeing it or to not understanding it, unaware of the  code that reveals its instances and meaning, beyond what we know to be there, signaled as the  divine, invisible to everyone to whom it has not been revealed? 

Yoshua Okón takes note of the boundaries between what we can see and what we want to  see, between what we overlook and hide from what we make out within our field of vision, running  a bit like the automobile we’ve decided not to see until the last moment, surrounded by mirrors that  would tell us about it, that would show it to us, so that we’ll pay attention to those places that  define us as a kind of circumference, a moment before and a moment after. I have no doubt that  there are magnetic fields all around our bodies, around every other kind of body, around the whole  planet, and what lies beyond. These are little acts of faith and assumptions that have us acting  carelessly, those of us who pay no heed that they reduce and dispel invisibility. Filters make all the  difference, determining the possibilities and levels of what can be seen; they are what shifts mere  perception toward blindnesses that are known or assumed, on the basis of conditioning,  conventions, and assumptions, transcending our perception toward social or political bodies; we  see what we want to see. 

And yet, they are there to be seen; whether one wants or is able to see them is another  thing; one has to insist on what is there, either in the work or left out. 

That is the standpoint from which Yoshua Okón leads us to see this invisibility, that which is  there even though we cannot see it—to unsee it, to accept that it escapes our perception. To this  end he makes recourse to Ishihara tests, which are used for diagnosing and classifying abnormalities in color vision, but doing so in formal terms by deforming and reformulating their inherent syntax, bringing together and accumulating different colors and shades, offering a  dynamic tension that opens up from the standpoint of chromatic perception, closing what—in the  final instance—gets seen. Because Yoshua Okón has a form of color blindness, and is incapable of  perceiving certain shades of color, he has delved into synthesizing—if that word applies—colors  that can be perceived by someone with his condition but not by normal or conventional “seers” (a  word so marvelous I cannot resist using it). The colors are there for those who can see them; those  who are unable to do so can at least know they are there, despite the impossibility of knowing them  beyond the testimony that avers their existence, unable to access the code that reveals it as a  phenomenon, as a presential act, as evidence. Hidden like the numerals in Ishihara tests, there is a  message in those colors that is only perceptible by those who share Okón’s exceptional condition,  which includes 8% of the male population and 0.5% of the female population worldwide. 

It is in these terms, from the standpoint of access (or lack thereof) to a code that would  enable one to see beyond appearances in order to read what it says, in the learned notion of a code  as a form of writing, that I can refer, in turn, to a piece by Mathias Goeritz titled Poema plástico,  originally mounted on a wall at the Museo Experimental El Eco in 1953. The poem itself is presented 

to us as an object in its immanence; what it might mean remains inaccessible, beyond its formal  evidence. It is a poem that reveals itself to us as such topologically and typographically, but just  trying to read it does not allow us to see what it says; doing so only allows us to see it, contained  in its own signification, refused apart from its possibility. It was only a few years ago that, thanks  to the collective work of three specialists, the code was deciphered and presented in a document that describes the process of cracking it, and ultimately reveals it as something that was,  paradoxically, self-evident, with respect to what is in front of us but unable to be seen. The poem  contains a manifesto by Goeritz against his enemies in the art world, which he concludes with the  open, joyous affirmation of a child: “I shit colors like gold.” Negated in his intestines, the inherent  colors of the contents have been reduced to different tones of maroon; Goeritz transcends this possibility, just as Yohua Okón does, in order to make them shine in an evidence that, in its  particularity, is a privilege. 

It is a kind of happiness for those who can see it, for those who can read it, transposed and  transcended. These colors shine forth, their meaning hidden—like Goeritz’s gold—and yet in plain  sight, one step ahead of you, intransigent and stubborn, whether you have the means and the  ability to see—and understand—it… or not.