The Limits of Language: Clark Medley’s Passion and Unspeakable

By Milagros Bello, PhD

Clark Medley’s practice gravitates around the paradox of language—its capacity to inscribe meaning and simultaneously to collapse into opacity, excess, and silence. In both Passion and Unspeakable, Medley turns writing into a terrain of tension, where the boundaries between legibility and illegibility, discourse and affect, dissolve into unstable surfaces of visual intensity.

In Passion, the canvas becomes a palimpsest of textual layers; in the background, the artist has transcribed around 100 designs from his Tattoo profession, with figures of multiple evocations and referenced affective stories; in the second plane, the hidden word passion is in Medley’s black typographies in arabesque contortions, forming an architectural scaffold that evokes rationality and cultural inscription. This structure is disrupted by the eruption of a glittering red rose in metal flakes traced with energetic strokes that exceed the boundaries of text. The rose, a classical emblem of love and desire, appears not only as a symbol to be decoded but as a force that unsettles the legible order of the work. The glitter amplifies its presence into the realm of seduction and excess, making the gesture itself the site of passion. What emerges is an “illegible script,” a visual language that articulates desire without ever becoming fully communicable. Medley positions passion as a semiotic disturbance: something felt, intuited, embodied, but never fully captured by words.

Unspeakable, by contrast, shifts from the two-dimensional surface to an expanded installation. Suspended cylindrical tubes, each containing rolled canvases inside painted with typographies and contrasting chromes, punctuate the air as vertical vectors of color and energy. His calligraphy, as a coded language of secrecy, encapsulates inscriptions of pure signification stripped of referent. They do not carry words but vibrations—signals that cannot be spoken yet demand reception. By displacing language into three-dimensional space, Medley emphasizes its performative and spatial dimensions: language is no longer something read, but something encountered, inhabited, and physically experienced.

The title Unspeakable resonates here as more than a metaphor. It is a confrontation with the limits of articulation, a meditation on what exceeds verbal discourse—trauma, secrecy, eros, and the ineffable. The viewer is invited to inhabit a suspended space where language is both everywhere and nowhere, hovering between form and dissolution.

The Passion painting and the Unspeakable installation articulate Medley’s ongoing inquiry into the borders of expression. Both works foreground language on the verge of breaking into gesture, ornament, or silence. Medley’s work situates the viewer in a liminal space where the sayable confronts the unsayable, where the inscriptions implode, and writing no longer communicates but vibrates.

Medley’s art becomes a poetics of the unutterable, where silence burns into form, and absence speaks.

At Mia Curatorial Projects   /[email protected]/ +17863570568 @miacuratorial @milagrosbellocurator

Minimalism Art artists in Asia

The development of Minimal Art in Asia is a profound and distinct story. It did not emerge as a direct imitation of Western Minimalism but rather evolved from deep within local artistic, philosophical, and spiritual traditions, often converging with similar formal concerns around simplicity, materiality, and repetition.

Asian Minimalism is frequently more introspective, metaphysical, and connected to nature and ancient thought (like Zen Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism) than its Western counterpart.

Here is a list of key artists and movements associated with Minimal Art in Asia:

Japan: The Mono-ha (School of Things) Movement

This is arguably the most significant and defined Minimalist-related movement in Asia. Emerging in the late 1960s (parallel to Western Post-Minimalism), Mono-ha artists focused on the encounter between natural and industrial materials, arranged in unaltered, transient states. The goal was not to create a new object but to reveal the world as it is by emphasizing the relationships between things.

• Nobuo Sekine (1942-2019): Created the seminal work Phase—Mother Earth (1968), which involved digging a cylindrical hole in the ground and compacting the earth into a perfect cylinder of the same dimensions next to it. This simple act highlighted the essence of “thing-ness.”
• Lee Ufan (b. 1936, Korean-born): The key theorist of Mono-ha. His Relatum series (which continues today) involves placing a natural stone in relation to a single industrial steel plate or glass pane, creating a tense, quiet, and philosophical dialogue between the materials.
• Susumu Koshimizu (b. 1944): Known for works like From Surface to Surface (1971), where he cut a massive, uncarved timber block in half and precisely placed the two halves next to each other, focusing on the material’s inherent properties.
• Kishio Suga (b. 1944): Creates intricate yet minimal installations using wood, stone, wire, glass, and paraffin. His work Parallel Strata (1969) uses planks of wood, wire, and rocks to create a precarious but balanced intervention in space.

Korea: Dansaekhwa (Monochromatic Painting)

While primarily a painting movement, Dansaekhwa (Tansaekhwa) shares Minimalism’s core tenets of reduction, repetition, and emphasis on process and materiality. It is deeply rooted in Korean spirituality and a meditative, physical engagement with the canvas.

• Park Seo-Bo (1931-2023): A founding father of Dansaekhwa. His lifelong Écriture series involves drawing fine, repeated lines into a wet, monochromatic pulp of paper and pigment, creating a textured, meditative surface that records the artist’s bodily rhythm.
• Ha Chong-Hyun (b. 1935): Known for his Conjunction series. He pushes thick oil paint through the back of a burlap canvas to the front, focusing on the physical confrontation with the material and the resulting textured, monochromatic surface.
• Lee Ufan: Also a central figure in Dansaekhwa. His

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Minimalism Art Movement in Central and South America

The story of Minimalism in Central and South America is a fascinating one of parallel development and distinct reinterpretation. While sharing formal similarities with the North American and European movements, Latin American Minimalism was deeply infused with local materials, political contexts, and spiritual concerns. It was less about industrial purity and more about poetics, politics, and place.

The movement is often referred to more accurately as Geometric Abstraction, Neo-Concretism, or Specific Abstraction in the region, highlighting its unique characteristics.

Here is an overview of the Minimalism-related art movement in Central and South America, focusing on key countries and artists.

Core Characteristics: How It Differed from Anglo-American Minimalism

• Poetics over Industry: While using simple forms, the work often sought poetic, sensory, or spiritual engagement rather than purely intellectual or phenomenological confrontation.
• Political Context: Many artists worked under dictatorships and military regimes (Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela). Their use of systematic, logical forms could be a silent protest against chaos and oppression, or a utopian proposal for a new social order.
• Organic and Local Materials: Unlike the industrial focus of Judd or Flavin, Latin American artists often used wood, cloth, thread, and found materials, connecting the work to craft traditions and the local environment.
• Audience Participation: Influenced by Neo-Concretism, many works demanded physical interaction from the viewer to be complete, breaking down the passive barrier between art and audience.

Key Countries and Artists

Brazil: The Neo-Concrete Movement (Neo-Concretismo)

This was arguably the most influential and philosophically distinct movement. It emerged in the late 1950s as a reaction against the rigid rationalism of European Concrete art.

• Lygia Clark (1920-1988): Her series Bichos (Critters) were sculptural works made of hinged metal plates that invited the viewer to touch and manipulate them, transforming the art object into a relational experience. This was a radical departure from the static, impersonal object of Anglo-American Minimalism.
• Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980): He evolved from geometric painting to immersive, participatory installations. His Parangolés were wearable capes made of fabric, ropes, and sometimes poetic texts, meant to be danced in, especially in samba schools. They fused color, structure, dance, and social engagement.
• Lygia Pape (1927-2004): Her iconic work Ttéia 1, C (2003) is a perfect example: a delicate, shimmering web of golden threads stretched across a room. It uses a simple, repetitive structure to create a sublime, experiential environment rooted in light and space.

Venezuela: Kinetic and Geometric Art

Venezuela embraced geometric abstraction with a strong emphasis on optical effects and public integration.

• Jesús Rafael Soto (1923-2005): Famous for his “Penetrables,” immersive installations made of hundreds of hanging nylon tubes that viewers walk through. This creates a sensory experience of vibration and visual instability, using repetition to achieve a transformative effect.
• Carlos Cruz-Diez (1923-2019): A central figure in Kinetic art, his work focused on the phenomenon of color. Pieces like his Physichromie series use structured, repeated lines of color to create effects that change based on the viewer’s movement, making perception the core of the work.
• Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt) (1912-1994): Perhaps the closest to a “Minimalist” sculptor. Her magnificent series Reticulárea (1969) were vast, net-like structures woven from wire, suspended in space. They rejected solid geometric form in favor of fragile, organic, and complex webs that responded to gravity and light.

Argentina: Conceptual and Systemic Art

Argentine artists often combined Minimalist aesthetics with rigorous conceptual frameworks, frequently in response to political turmoil.

• Liliana Porter (b. 1941): While later work is narrative, her early work in the 1960s was a key part of the Nueva Tendencia (New Tendency) movement. She created precise geometric prints and objects that explored perception and seriality.
• León Ferrari (1920-2013): Known for his political work, his early Boxes were minimalist, structured wooden containers holding abstract, wiry forms, creating a contrast between order and chaos.
• David Lamelas (b. 1946): A conceptual artist who used minimalist structures to investigate time and space. His work Situations of Time (1970) used text and simple props to create a self-reflective analysis of the exhibition environment.

Uruguay

• Joaquín Torres-García (1874-1949): Though a predecessor, his theory of Universalismo Constructivo (Constructive Universalism) was foundational. He combined the grid of European modernism with indigenous symbols, creating a structured, personal language that influenced generations of artists seeking a locally rooted abstraction.

Summary: A Different “Minimalism”

Latin American artists did not simply imitate a North American trend. They developed their own vocabulary of reduction:

• It was Anthropological: Connected to the body, ritual, and social life.
• It was Political: Existed as a form of order or resistance within unstable political landscapes.
• It was Organic: Used grids and structures that felt hand-made, fragile, and responsive to their environment, rather than machine-made and alien.

To understand this movement, one must look beyond the term “Minimalism” and explore the rich histories of Neo-Concretism (Brazil), Kinetic Art (Venezuela), and Geometric Abstraction across the continent.