Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Photostats

In the middle of another pandemic fueled by government neglect, Gonzalez-Torres’s investigations into the contingencies and coincidences of history resound with urgency. -- Kyle Croft * Bookforum *
Photostats honors Gonzalez-Torres in all the right ways ... To my mind, [the Photostats] are best described as concrete poems that speak to the ethics of memory in a culture of coerced and embodied forgetting; collages of remembering, naming, and the contention of individual existence, particularly that of the marginalized and dispossessed ... They will take your breath away. -- Elizabeth Zuba * Hyperallergic *
Unlike the stars, we do not write, luminously, on a dark field (Mallarmé). Yet Gonzalez-Torres’s inscriptions do act as constellations, as celestial alphabet. Events worth remembering, the count of years—they are light beams orienting us as we go on forgetting. -- Mónica de la Torre * Paris Review *
Made at the height of the AIDS crisis, in a pre-internet era, the photostats—a series of fixed works with white serif text on black fields framed behind glass to create a reflective surface—are profoundly suggestive lists of political, cultural, and historical references. These works disrupt linear time, the seemingly causal relationships of chronology, and hierarchies of information as they ask how we receive and prioritize information, how we remember and forget, and how we continuously create new meaning. The photostats have a deep kinship with poetry in their use of specificity and ambiguity, operating as open fields: each juxtaposition and its oblique friction illuminates connections and disconnections. * Art Agenda *
Photostats is a timeless social commentary on the difficult and ongoing work that lies ahead to create a more just world. This volume is gorgeous in its simplicity and profound in its form, invoking multiple reads and multiple meanings upon each view. -- Lee Ann Norman * Brooklyn Rail *