Middle Gate

"Long rolls of paper, protected by display cases, stretch the length of a corridor. They are rolls of sheet music, such as were used, above all in the epoch before phonographic recordings, to supply operational information to mechanical musical instruments such as pianolas, orchestrions and funfair organs. The holes punched in the paper made it possible to encode a sound form, which was selected by pneumatic-mechanical means and translated into audible phenomena using the respective instrument. As if played by an invisible hand, the pieces of music were then heard, providing atmospheric sounds in a honky-tonk, at a variety show or at the funfair – a reification of the mechanical principle, a perpetual recurrence of the same piece under the conditions of obsessive repetition, dictated by the accompanying economic circumstances.

Yet in the case of those media, reminiscent of papyrus rolls, which in 1997 were presented as part of a solo exhibition by Ricardo Brey at the Salzburg Kunstverein, the logic of homo faber was undermined, and to a certain extent transcended, by means of a wide variety of interventions. Some of the paper is augmented by additional information in the form of inscribed lines, which although they may perhaps be able to guide the subconscious, are not in any condition to operate a musical instrument. Inlays of gold run like a seam through the delineable surface, changing its texture. Delicate cords are arranged into wavelike forms and remind one of sinus curves. Time and again, one also sees smudges and smears which desacralize the material, while questions of time and transience are raised by the traces of use and wear. In one place, 
a transparent cloth is hung over a roll of paper, unfolding the magic of a dialectics of disclosure and concealment. Bundles of folded paper and a long bird’s beak pointing downwards allow the installational situation to extend into the three-dimensional, while explicit inscriptions in clear typography, such as “forte” or “bajo” transfer the presumptive sensuality of the sounds of the waltz, stored in the perforated rolls of sheet music, to the abstraction of the sign.

One can see a palimpsest in the work of Ricardo Brey. An intuitive overwriting of an operational module, which paradoxically utilizes the precision of physical processes to create the appearance of that ecstatic expenditure of energy associated with the waltz in the nineteenth century."

(Miessgang, T., Que le importa al Tigre una Raya Más: The Futility of Good Intentions, 2014, p.101.)