carlier | gebauer is pleased to announce Abschriften, a solo exhibition of new works by the Spanish artist Néstor Sanmiguel Diest. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

In Jorge Luis Borges’ Pierre Menard, Author of Quixote (1939) a fictitious French writer named Pierre Menard undertakes the task of painstakingly writing Cervantes’ 17th century novel line by line. The short story, which first appeared in the Argentine journal Sur, was cited by philosophers like Foucault, Deleuze, and Blanchot in their considerations of notions like authenticity, authorship, repetition, and difference.

Néstor Sanmiguel Diest paints as much with literature, selections from philosophical texts, and found scraps of paper as with inks and pigments. Text functions as a kind of raw material that the artist draws upon to make his work. Whether a citation from a novel, scraps of concert tickets, receipts, or philosophical quotations, Sanmiguel Diest treats each source as equal to the other, a process that he has described as “working with overlapping layers of contaminated information soaked by rain”.