Jorge Méndez Blake: Apollinaire’s Misspell and Other Calligrams

Fiction is in Méndez Blake the beginning of exile and the beginning of everything else. It is through it that a system becomes articulated within his work that cannot but contain the textual discourse of another. Mountain, edifice and text unveil each other constructing an operation where memory plays a fundamental role and which replicates the literary, and the real, voyage. If fiction in Méndez Blake´s practice occupies the center then once again it is pertinent to quote Eliade: “The road leading to the center is a «difficult road» (durohana), and this is verified in all levels of the real: difficult circumlocutions of a temple (such as Barabudur); pilgrimage to holy sites (Mecca, Hardwuar, Jerusalem, etc.); dangerous pilgrimages in the heroic expeditions of the Golden Fleece, the Gold Apples, the Bush of Life, etc.; getting lost in the labyrinth; the hardship endured by he who searches for the path to the self, to the «center» of the self, etc