9 September – 16 October 2022

Opening reception Friday, September 9 from 6–10 pm

Marginal Utility is proud to present Glitches on an Afternoon Shelf, a solo exhibition by the  Tennessee based artist Rubens Ghenov.

In the span of three unidentified years during the first half of the 1970’s, a Spaniard poet, after relocating to the adjacent Iberian neighbor, disappeared almost completely. The few friends and acquaintances the unpublished writer had were incognizant of his whereabouts, plans or activities (1).

Throughout that time, the poet Angélico Morandá (2) amassed a collection of notebooks he later referred to as falhas or glitches (3). Unlike his routine abstruse poems and cartographical calculations, the copious notebooks contained amalgams of oblique annotations, equations, scrawls, and even collages, that although densely contributed to his philosophy; by themselves, manifested new origins for the poet.

The works that comprise this show parallel Morandá’s error-prone prophetic notes. Though these paintings are sourced from different bodies of work made in the last three years, they glitch from their respective cohort, almost as if one thing did not fully osmose with its others and thusly developed a new organism in their silent betwixt locus (4). Negative space made positive.

1. Alfreda Aguilar, “Anécdotas de las Vidas Poéticas” translated by Noricema Washington, 79.
2. A fictive poet crafted in Bodhisattva merit.
3. “My error, however, must be the path of a truth…”_ Clarice Lispector, “The Passion According to G.H.”
(New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2012), 111.
4. “A note exists between two notes of music, between two facts exists a fact, between two grains of sand no matter how close together there exists an interval of space, a sense that exists between senses — in the interstices of primordial matter is the line of mystery and fire that is the breathing of the world, and the continual breathing of the world is what we hear and call silence…”_ Clarice Lispector, “The Passion According to G.H.” (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2012) , 99.