Fragmentation and Totality
We Westerners divide reality into fragments, and as a result we confine ourselves to a radical
solitude. In our fragmented worldview, hot and cold, hate and love, and by extension all extremes,
find themselves tragically separated before the cyclops beam of our perception. In reality all
extremes are beginning and end, start and finish of the same road. There is only a difference of
degree between them, not of nature. If this were not the case, at what temperature would the cold
stop being cold and become heat?
It is likely that this logic is an inheritance that we have been carrying around since Aristotle and his
principle of non-contradiction. In this logic, what I am not (the non-being) remains forever separated
from my person. And don’t we observe, among ourselves, this lack of empathy? Everybody is labeled
«the others», and otherness -Ezequiel thinks- is friend of violence.
It has been barely 200 years since the philosopher Hegel, with his Logic, reconciled the extremes,
giving meaning to the philosophical «becoming». Unfortunately, the author’s arduous style makes his
work hardly accessible, and it will take a few more centuries before we can fully enjoy the blessings
of his Logic in the Western world.
«Fragmentation and totality,» by Ezequiel Martinez Llaser, attempts to approach these questionings
by calling upon the figures of the pixel, the Tetris, the puzzle and the Rubik’s cube as metaphors of
this rupture of the Whole. The solitude that emerges from his works expresses the feelings of his
contemporaries ; while reflecting his creative process, as he retreated to the snowy mountains of
northern Italy, seeking to convert his ideas into the form of symbols.
ezequiel martinez llaser 