The billboards—abandoned, strange, blank, cryptic, or illegible—evoke the bankruptcy of public discourse. In the series Democracy, a cluster of blank billboards, about the size of portable whiteboards, face one another like individuals engaged in conversation. As stand-ins for citizens, the billboards suggest that communication has become little more than sloganeering. As Wellesley states in this interview, “The billboard series is about my reaction against power, boredom, repetition, and emptiness.”
Wellesley’s work, ranging from paintings and drawings to objects and installations, is preoccupied with language. The artist coined the term “textructures” to refer to his interest in dissecting and interrupting systems of meaning. His work often depicts the failures or inefficiencies of language, and it addresses the difficulties of “reading” one’s community, and the world.
What sparked your interest in the billboard?
I have been working with language since my first year at ISA (Instituto Superior de Arte) in Cuba. My primary interest is the relationship between truth, reality, and language. I’m fascinated by the mechanisms that people use to communicate and create meaning. There are elements from daily life that influence our behavior and the way we represent reality through language. The billboard, as one of the most artful objects invented for propaganda and advertising, is an example. In Cuba, billboards are propaganda devices that, over time, become ignored and useless. That’s why I often use this object to talk about a crisis of communication in a society starving for information and freedom. Also, billboards are like canvases, but with a wide range of viewers in public space. Anything we put there will shape our environment and may have social, cultural, or political implications.
Some of your works address the difficulties of reading, as with No Translation and Wrong Reading. I am fascinated by the Dyslexia Paintings; can you explain these?
That is exactly the effect and message that is a part of this dialogue—the difficulty in understanding, or the unwillingness to understand, something that is imposed on us, such as ideologies. The billboard series is about my reaction against power, boredom, repetition, and emptiness.
No Translation is a painting that shows the symbolic weight of an element that is supposed to be full of content but instead floats like a UFO with an unrecognizable message.
In the series Wrong Reading, I manipulated the information of well-known advertising around the world to create new phrases that sometimes flip their meaning and message. The procedure was an exercise in editing—to offer new phrases sometimes silly, ironic, or critical. I made them with an oxide pigment to alter the perception of time and space, as if the viewer had found these messages rusted and abandoned from ages past.
The work Dyslexia is part of research I have been doing on the relationship between image and text. I like to treat an image as a text and vice versa to find new possibilities of expression. Dyslexia is a problem with processing language. That's why I show these spaces as rusty, forbidden, and undermined. Here we reach a point where a logical communication is broken.
Many of your works seem to be interested in the experience of language in public space. In the works Democracy and The Damn Circumstances of Politics Everywhere, the whiteboards, or billboards, are in groups, like people gathering and shouting slogans rather than interacting. Has your work been influenced by politics in the United States?
These two series were done in Cuba, where I was living until 2014. Democracy is a questioning of this concept today. Billboards are here like a crowd aimlessly chatting. The individual voices disappear when they are indoctrinated or act in groups. But I want to be more positive; my suggested white spaces are proposals for viewers to fill in their own cultural memories, much as artists do when faced with a white canvas.
The Damn Circumstances of Politics Everywhere is an installation of five large-format paintings that together depict the shape of the island of Cuba. These billboards are installed in a random narrative order. The idea comes from a poem by the Cuban writer Virgilio Piñera who describes the conditions of living surrounded by water and in isolation. In Cuba, everything is still singularly political—an entire country is run by one political party. This singular political message is a huge contrast to the United States, a country of several parties. I like to provoke thinking. For instance, one year ago, someone saw Democracy and, insulted, said to me: Is that what you think of our democracy—it is empty? My response: I just want you to see how mass media manages our behavior even without us being aware of it. I think there are sophisticated methods of manipulation in terms of information, and I just want you to reflect on the concept of democracy and whether that concept that you hold so true is still the same.
Do you see the drawings, paintings, and objects in the series Subterfuges as models for actual billboards that you would like to see built, or are they fantasies?
I was invited to show at the Havana Biennial in 2012. For my project Subterfuges, I proposed three billboards, Astigmatismo [Astigmatism], Exit/Exito [Exit/Success], and ¿Que nos inspira? [What inspires us?], to be installed on the roofs and facades of three specific buildings in the city, but my project was rejected due to government censorship. What I like most about this project is that, depending on where you place the work, it will have different meanings. I was very aware of the implications of my proposal, but I hoped to be able to show them because the phrases are universal and neutral. It worked out for me, anyway, because my project provoked a not entirely surprising reaction.
Working with language is a challenge; on the surface, it’s very explicit, but I always explore the underlying meaning. This is something that I like to call “textructures.” It is a process where I use texts and symbolic images in the world of communication in order to talk about its arbitrary and abstract essence. I am fascinated by finding elements or ideas that show the inefficiency of language. That’s why my textructures are ambiguous, and sometimes direct, poetical, and contradictory.
Recently, I installed my first public sculpture here in the United States. For me, it is a process of giving back ideas to the spaces where they come from in order for the work to interact with the public. No matter what you do, an artwork will generate many more messages for viewers than an artist can imagine. That is real communication. Art is a proposition, not an imposition.
The concept of “truth” does come up in your work. It’s one of the “games” in Five Words, and the concept of “truth” is branded an illusion, mere metal, not a coin, in your piece By the Poet F.N. Can you talk about this work? How important is that Nietzsche quote to you as an artist?
The nihilism and thoughts about the death of God in Friedrich Nietzsche’s writing made me think of the uselessness of conventions. We have been searching for truth for millennia. Truth is an ultimate essence, the core of language. By the Poet F.N. is a work where I use a quote from Nietzsche which, I believe, is one of the first texts about the crisis of paradigms like “God” and “Truth.” It is an essay from 1873, entitled “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” I created the lightbox in black and white, to exclude the chance for interpretation. It is a paradox because the text criticizes truth, canons, and conventions in a poetic way.
In Five Words, I selected five concepts that I consider extremely important for human beings: Truth, Life, Time, Past, and Honor. Of course, there are more than these five, but I chose those after much thought focusing on key words. I then decided to offer viewers the opportunity to play with concepts that are forbidden. Those pieces were installed on a wall, and then people were able to play with the artworks to make them readable.
Lastly, I’d love to hear about the installation Semiotic Tree, most recently exhibited in Aachen.
This particular piece was a starting point for many other works that have a semiotic background. I arrived at the idea by a thorough investigation of a single word in a dictionary, searching for the root of the word. I started with the word “truth,” trying to discover its essence. Using a thesaurus in Spanish, I found a huge universe of concepts related to each other. In the beginning, the piece was just a simple drawing on paper; that grew and expanded until it looked like a huge chaotic mural filled with words. I then realized that researching the word “truth” took me to its opposing meaning–“lie.” The work comes full circle, which made sense to me. The title came from the shape of a family tree, with its different generations in a timeline.
The first version of this piece was exhibited in 2004, in a group show about Art + Science in Havana Gallery, Cuba. The second version was made for a solo show in 2015 at South Florida Art Center, Miami, USA. In 2017, I was invited to show this work in a group show called Kunst x Kuba - Contemporary Perspectives since 1989, at Ludwig Forum for International Art in Aachen, Germany. This time I got help from the museum specialists to remake the piece in German. It made me change the diagram a bit because the words were very long. That experience taught me how the German language can create a whole idea in just one word which is very suggestive for my work.
