Inescapable Versions of Time
If it were possible to visualize a moment, Ahora es cuando (The moment is now) would show exactly that. It would capture a synchronic, horizontal “cut” of a temporary reality as opposed to a diachronic, vertical line following a historical logic where a process of cause and effect explains facts.
The night is black and darkness isn’t exactly pessimistic; it’s the color of uncertainty and blindness. Joaquín Boz’s pencil-on-paper opaque and abstract forest suggests a night of wind and coal where objects are hard to distinguish. Susana Saravia’s painting is equally abstract but employs acrylic. It seems to depict a black landscape although a couple of white flares appear in the distance. In the piece by Federico Lanzi, on the other hand, gloss and colors contrast against a black background. Though objects don’t look clear yet, the view is starting to focus.
This group of art-works imagines a temporal cross-section and supposes that, “the transversal exists in an underlying level of communication,” as writes curator Mariano Luna. Perhaps it’s possible to describe this “frozen” moment in Zeno’s paradoxical terms; in the race between Achilles and the tortoise, the distance that separates them divides in an infinite quantity of fractions. The athlete will never reach his opponent no matter how slow it goes. The works in the room become images or different versions of those impossible fragments of time. This is how they share some elements and differ in many others.
Rosalba Mirabella’s photos depict post-nuclear landscapes. Perfectly focused and difficult to associate with a specific period, they present identifiable shapes in atemporal gray tones. A closer look will reveal that proportions escape logic; it’s not just a mise-en-scène but also a small-scale model. The sense of reality becomes altered using black and white pictures, usually the support of documentary, photographic works.
At other times, a formless sight dominates the view from the center of the room: a vertical and slim sculpture by Diego Bianchi, made of wooden and metallic broken, unidentifiable stuff, eludes value and historical transcendency. It stands next to a white pedestal that contrasts with Adrián Villar Rojas’ careful, albeit chaotic mix of mini pop-culture fetishes that is unified by black patina. The title of piece, “Todo lo que vos sos y yo no” (Everything that you are and I am not), defines identity in relation to negativity and pop culture.
Objects here are clearly discernible, as in San Poggio’s contribution on the opposing wall. His geometry of strange proportions in “Recital” (Rock Concert) combines levels of architecture that confuses nature and artifice without being chaotic. They present a logic only possible on canvas though lines threaten to continue beyond the frame’s limit.
In his work, ”La forma débil”, Martín Legón appears to write with his “weak” hand, phrases that range from Maquiavelo’s political theory to love; the scrawled phrases, in turn, become indecipherable images. His texts don’t explain or anchor the meaning of images, as it happens usually in journalism, but become image themselves.
Text may also relate an anecdote that complements the image, becoming an element that helps it exceed the frame. In “S/P”, Marcelo Pombo narrates how he appropriated a Pablo Suárez reproduction. Suárez was an Argentine painter from the previous generation of artists who worked with Pombo in important exhibitions during the 1990s. Pasted with childish butterfly stickers and flared with black graphite that continues on the adjacent wall, “S/P”, a play on S/T, Sin Título (Untitled), may suggest Sin Pablo (Without Pablo) or simply Suárez Pablo. The text alleges that Pombo commissioned the frame that contains the original reproduction, but the work clearly goes beyond it.
Ahora es cuando makes a statement about an imaginary still moment, creating a synchronic, dialectical relation among images in the room. Because it considers the moment as unavoidable and decisive, it regards freedom as an “impossible-to-practice concept”. However, the curator Mariano Luna optimistically adds in the catalogue that history “inevitably heads towards anarchy and common good.”
Text by Gabriela Schevach
Ahora es cuando
Fondo Nacional de las Artes
Alsina 673, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Through December 22nd
Monday – Friday
10 am – 4 pm
http://www.fnartes.gov.ar/
(Source: juanele)
Reblogged from juanele
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