In recent years, that indiscernibility has become an edge on which certain contemporary artists have been balancing, a kind of suture of the old debate by joining both shores. This group of artists found a boat where they could forget that confrontation and navigate the waves with a white flag. The works of Carolina Simonelli, Carla Bertone, Keiko González, Jesu Antuña, Luciana Levinton, Niño Grande, Pablo Sinaí and Carolina Magnin converge in this fertile field, destroying the binarism of the debate.

Voluntarily removed, temporarily detached from that discussion, these artists work in border areas finding the abstract in the elements of nature and in the most common views, or discovering that the real tends to appear as an abstract, unpredictable and inexplicable form. In the colors, in the forms and in the planes the real beats; and in the dimly recognizable figures an explosion always beats that deforms them to the point of ignorance. That is the premise. These works, these artists, do not travel one trend or the other: they travel in reverse the path that images previously used to escape, as if they were entering through the emergency door to the visual fabric that ties contemporary subjectivities, where memory reigns. , metaphysics and nature, among other territories.

In the series “Multiple” Pablo Sinaí builds patterns of decorative nuance from the multiplication of the shape of a butterfly, and despite the precision and geometric beauty of his paintings, at one point the plot begins to slowly trap us to let us inside. The work “I only wanted to see what was inside” by Carolina Simonelli is the excessive manifestation of the invisible interior of natural things: an organic, warm and slow beat of forms that, due to their unfolding and materiality, invade the body and mirror its inner touch. In a similar move, Carolina Magnin’s photographs belonging to the “Narbe” project focus on the active fungi that nested in photos and negatives of medical and family files. With this gesture, Magnin gives prominence to the impiousness of photographic materiality and reveals the mutability of celluloid at the same time as the fragility of images, presenting what happens inside matter as abstract forms of the passage of time. This is something that also happens in the photographs of Jesu Antuña, from the series “The last round around the sun”. In its gradient of purple and yellow colors, where all you can see is the rectangular ghost of different archive photos that he exhibited thanks to the action of the sun, Antuña produces an abstract image of the mechanism of memory: a slow disappearing and a slow appear, simultaneously.

If it is about disfiguring the most immediate reality, the works of González, Levinton and Niño Grande destabilize, each in their own way, the internal pillars that support objects and things: Levinton blowing up their architectures, transforming certain emblematic buildings into extemporaneous floating forms; González using the eye’s ability to recognize the softening of the horizon, the window or the cups of his daily views; and Niño Grande flattening and leveling visual information of contradictory origins, mixing the popular impulse of images with the delicacy of oriental decorative art, as if he found his carafes in the virtuality of the internet, where the tangible and the illusory can be threaded.

Finally, Carla Bertone’s works embody abstract forms, and in their “mathematicity”, in their material perfection and precise filigree, they modify the spaces that surround them, transforming themselves into access portals to another possible dimension, where perhaps the structure exists. bone of the immediate reality that we live. That is why the piece “Hypnotic” and its seductive crystalline forms is the work closest to the entrance to the room, and to this entire universe of dislocated images.

After more than a year of an anomalous world situation, this group of works is not escaping anything, they are not presented today as vehicles of a disengagement in the face of the urgent and immediate. Because perhaps the solution is not to leave art and abandon it, but to enter the territory of images with the desire to find

Marcos Krämer – Invierno de 2021