Press Release
Cuatro [Four]: Leandro Katz, David Lamelas, Marta Minujín, Horacio Zabala
To think is to discriminate. Had we not been able to extract discrete units out of the amorphous magma of chaos, we would never have thought. As all cosmogonies tell: the cosmos arose out of formless chaos, in a birth that took place without witnesses. We don't know how the humans of the Paleolithic age managed it, but we do know for certain that some thousands of years ago, those seeds of sense and meaning acquired the abstract power we now call ideas. As is clear from Werner Herzog's film The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which reflects upon the world's earliest extant paintings (those of the Chauvet caves, in France), the production of the first paintings on rock was a collaborative labor that spanned millennia: we see certain images of both a brutal realism and an impressive elegance; images which represent rhinoceroses and bears, faintly sketched 32,000 years ago and completed just 26,000 years ago. Between the first lines of the drawing and its final completion, 60 centuries passed: more time than that which separates us from the Egyptian pyramids.
Art and thought are at once collective enterprises and deeply individual expressions. Producing meaning is the most complex and the most widespread of human enterprises. We are language. Without it, we would be like the other animals: we would not have the anguish of knowing ourselves to be mortal, nor would we feel gladness at being alive. Without knowing the tragedy of finitude, one cannot enjoy the happiness of intensity. Without death, life has no meaning. Art lurks in the interstices. In the intervals. In the space between two plenitudes. In that silence which allows music to reveal itself, the drama of being alive is enacted. The artists brought together again in Four start off with a bang: with the explosion of time (which is also that of fire, that of myth, that of meaning). Out of that shared spark they create dissimilar worlds. To endure the void of the real, the artists of the neolithic created three sources of meaning: religion, politics, and art. Religion and politics are closed universes one must obey as subordinates and submit to as believers. Art, on the other hand, requires neither submission nor obedience: it gives over, rather, to delirium and absurdity, to quest, to encounter. Art is a matter of putting in motion. In Cuatro, Leandro Katz, David Lamelas, Marta Minujín, and Horacio Zabala enter into a shared quest, each following a different path.
Marta Minujín gathered ashes from the volcano Puyehue in the region of the Villarino and Faulkner lakes and also took photographs documenting the effect of the volcanic ashes on that territory. She grew up in the area and was deeply moved to see that the multicolored landscape of the Patagonian Andes was transformed into a lunar, monochromatic, grey nightmare. She brought various flasks from there with volcanic ashes and turned them over to the other artists participating in this show so that they might give meaning to the meaninglessness of the natural when it explodes. Her installation is a visual reflection – which, in addition, integrates the interventions of the other artists – on the overwhelming power of nature when it violently manifests itself.
The beauty of destruction: thus we might sum up Minujín’s piece. The giant column of smoke and ashes of the Puyehue volcano calls to mind the atomic mushroom-cloud created by the bombing of Hiroshima. The horror of war raised to its sadistic extreme and the horror of the extremely low place of the human being before the unleashed power of the natural. In the visual imaginary, nature is humanized (it literally belittles) and seems to express its displeasure at the irrational form in which we have been using the earth we inhabit. There is in the work something of the biblical flood; of the apocalyptic punishments of the Sumerian gods. A plea for peace, humility, love. An intent to transform pain into knowledge.
Leandro Katz inscribes into the flask of volcanic ashes the essential opposition that founds Western culture (and the very meaning of the human): Eros and Thanatos. The power of life and the force of death. Out of the four colors related to fire, Katz composes a visual score that has the energy of an opera yet that is as subtle and ambiguous as a symphony. It affirms nothing. It denies nothing. It gives the viewer a chromatic repertory and a play of associations that may be exchanged, transformed, lost, enriched. It is like some long-sustained play of which we know only the initial rules. It is abstract and conceptual chess in which the warm colors, the flame of a match, and a set of linguistic distinctions (tragedy, drama, comedy, farce) sketch out an aleph of sense.
En este espacio dos personas no se encuentran [In this space two people do not meet up] by David Lamelas is a work that seems so simple and so explicit that even to speak of it seems to overburden it. Two clocks marking different times and a title that seems to complete the paradoxical meaning. Yet nothing is so simple or so explicit. Lamelas’s work presents a reflection on the whole of this exhibition: it shows the interval, that space between two different moments and between two objects. Difference. Distance. Different and distant: the basic condition for the emergence of language, thought, art. The “space” of Lamelas’s work is the de-synchronization of two clocks. They are objects, but what they measure is time. In that hole between temporalities and spaces, the discreet plot of our tragic fate is constructed: our being unto death. Do we find ourselves? Do we lose ourselves?
Horacio Zabala presents works from his Hypothesis series. These works put monochromes – pictures without image or composition – into relation with grammatical and/or mathematical signs. They lay out the conceptual map of a visual thinking concerned more with syntactic correspondences, hollows, and voids than with contents. It is the staging of the logical schema per se: a visual-conceptual logic that in its essential emptiness ends in a poem. Its music, so hushed, functions like some machine for imagining: it shows not the final images, but the process.
To transform the real into itself and make the world’s insignificance the basis of an art as necessary as the air we breathe is a risky wager: it presents us with an impossible void to fill, at the same time that it suggests to us a subtle poetry for decoding it. Between love and repulsion, between silence and rhythm, Cuatro does not seem to be a mere art show. It has the urgency of the necessary and the beauty of the secret. With new signs and unprecedented grammars, Cuatro bids us to imagine the impossible: that the world has meaning.
Daniel Molina