Opening on Sunday, September 9th, Miguel Abreu Gallery is pleased to present Jimmy Raskin’s Confession, the artist’s first one-person exhibition at the gallery. “A confession means that something happened in the past that was deceiving to others…and NOW must be revealed. So what is revealed here? My belief system. This belief system has had its benefits: real stories tackling core issues of expression. Yet now we are at a crossroads. By staging a confession, surrounded by memorials, one would think that I am purging for new possibilities.

However, here, I am confessing of my refusal to leave the prologue…” Since 1989, the year of the by now quasi-legendary “corner-jump” performance in which Jimmy Raskin repeatedly leapt into a corner and established his foundational split mode of expression – i.e. the mode of the Poet/Martyr coupled with the mode of the Documentarian/Philosopher – he has pursued the implications of this dualistic universe through various forms and media. He has given what he calls “lectures,” for instance, or flamboyant audio-visual performances addressing the existential conditions of the generalized figure of the Poet as he encounters the Philosopher on his path to the New Being. In 2005, he published The Poet, The Poltergeist &The Hollow Tree, a highly original book that analyzes the central metaphor of the tightrope walker in the Prologue of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. All along, he has produced countless texts, drawings, diagrams, sculptures and cartoons documenting the vicissitudes of the tightrope walker and his resuscitated counterpart, the inventive, restless figure of Pinn.

It can be said that as a whole, Raskin’s work is devoted to the mourning of what he considers to be a fundamental event: the death of the tightrope walker in Zarathustra’s Prologue. In the confessional video produced for this show, he articulates in prophet like manner the reasons why this event constitutes a border, and marks “the beginning of the beginning.”