Artistas

Inside and outside. The fundamental dichotomy simultaneously excludes and integrates, inviting introspection while demanding action. When the delicate tension between these perceptions is lost, a sense of deep estrangement takes control of experience. What happens next is the substance of CAPITAL, Eduardo Basualdo’s first exhibition at VNH Gallery.

The bareness of the general installation becomes a main feature in pieces like Intemperie (Outdoor) where the image of a landscape surrounds a single metal pipe. Through the picture, the piece claims both inside and outside as its own, while the steel supports everything above and beneath it. Out of it all, the viewer becomes a weightless observer, expelled from the linear paradigm that he used to rule, challenged to find new ways of protection.

In an adjacent wall, Pasivo (Passive) offers a dubious lifesaver in a black grille with all bars but one cut by the middle. The horizontal wounds inflicted in the pipes bring to mind ideas of tension and an aggressive, yet incomplete, break with reality.

While in most pieces the viewer perceives rigid limits and breaks, in works like Pasaje (Passage) he is allowed to dwell on the elasticity of the space, oblivious to the invisible barriers that threaten an experience that could, if damaged, be healed (Siete Puentes – Seven Bridges).

In the following gallery, a metallic fence activates automatically at even intervals, closing as it opens, opening as it closes. The size and heaviness of Voluntad (Will) emphasises the absurdity of the action it performs, as the viewer can easily come and go through the door that remains open at either side of the moving structure.

The word capital comes from the latin caput, meaning ‘head’, the top part of an animate body. As the heads of countries, state capitals struggle today to connect with their bodies, with obsolete structures cutting between parts, threatening instead of protecting experience.

Acknowledging that such control is senseless in an era of extreme porosity, Eduardo Basualdo invites the viewer to grasp the excitement and disorientation that surfaces when such limits are abolished.

VNH Gallery, Paris

L’étrange et impressionnante oeuvre Theory (2014), rappelant une météorite, s’impose et menace le spectateur de sa masse mystérieuse et démesurée, dont on ne peut atteindre et percer l’intériorité, ni ne reconnaître l’origine. Il s’agit d’expérimenter le mystère de cette forme dominant nos corps et nos consciences, suscitant nos doutes et réveillant nos interrogations. Dramatique et onirique, elle nous encourage à la contemplation autant qu’à la crainte de cet inconnu qui nous surplombe, supérieur à nos existences. Cette oeuvre, dont la masse n’est tenue que par une fine corde fait également référence à un équilibre fragile, pouvant être aisément brisé et pouvant s’abîmer sur les hommes, irrémédiablement soumis aux lois de la gravité.

Eduardo Basualdo, jeune artiste argentin, est très marqué par l’étude de la littérature, du théâtre, et de la psychanalyse. Ses oeuvres nous plongent dans un monde à l’étrange familiarité, inspiré des phénomènes naturels, des forces à l’oeuvre dans le monde. L’artiste mets en perspective la place de l’homme, son irrémédiable soumission et sa possible émancipation des forces universelles qui lui échappent. Quelles sont nos ressources face aux forces mystérieuses de la vie et de la nature sinon nos consciences et nos songes, fragiles mais élémentaires? « Je récupère l’idée de l’homme au centre de l’univers comme un oeil lucide capable de tout voir mais incapable de le comprendre et de le modifier. L’homme apparaît toujours dans mes oeuvres comme victime de circonstances qui lui échappent»1

The surprising and impressive work Theory (2014), recalling the shape of a meteorite, imposes itself physically to the public and dominates it, threatening the viewer with its mysterious and monumental mass which interiority and origin remain unreachable and unrecognizable. One can here experience the mystery of this architecture that is dominating our bodies and minds, awakening our doubts and arousing our interrogations. Dramatic and oneiric, Theory encourages both contemplation and fear towards the unknown, that seem to be irrevocably superior to our existences. The fragility of the work that is hanged only thanks to a fine rope is also evoking a fragile balance that can be easily broken and that could fall on men, according to the irreversible laws of gravity.

Eduardo Basualdo, a young argentinian artist, is very influenced by the study of literature, theatre, and psychoanalysis. His works plunge us in a world of strange familiarity, inspired by natural phenomenon and forces at work in our environment. The artists puts in perspective the place of man, its irreversible submission and potential emancipation from universal forces that evade from the control of human beings. What are our ressources in front of mysterious energies of life and nature if not our consciousnesses and illusions, that remain fragile but fundamental? “I return to the notion of man at the center of the universe like a lucid eye, capable of seing everything but incapable of understanding and changing it. In my work, man always appears as a victim of overwhelming circumstances”.1

Eduardo Basualdo est né en 1977 à Buenos Aires, Argentine. Il vit et travaille à Buenos Aires / Eduardo Basualdo was born in 1977 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He lives and works in Buenos Aires.
Le projet d’Eduardo Basualdo bénéficie du soutien de SamArt Projects et de la Fondation Misol, XXX.

1. Entretien avec Eduardo Basualdo, Annabelle Ténèze, Janvier 2013, in Eduardo T.Basualdo, Nervio, Analogues, 2013.

What happens when we arrive at an exhibition and, instead of finding some object or objects on which to focus our viewing experience, the object itself frustrates that effort? This is what happens when engaging with Eduardo Basualdo’s The End of Ending, 2012—which does have to be engaged with, consisting as it does of a large black object that almost fills the entire gallery. The piece imposes itself not only into the gallery, but also into the viewer’s personal viewing space with its striking scale, which has a decentralizing effect by forcing the navigation around the work to act as a new conduit for viewing: In order to find what’s around its crumpled surface, one must crouch, hunch, and touch. That said, the work is impressive not merely because of its size; it also has an organic quality that piques our inquisitiveness. Walking around the inflatable structure, you can see its active movement, and hear its subtle shifts, almost as if it has a life of its own.

Made with a thin, black metal foil used by lighting technicians in the film and theater industries, the piece was formed by laying out such strips and folding the edges together, inflating it to fit the space, then forming it into shape using a homemade tool. Its folds make it look like a giant alien rock, but its motion makes it appear to be breathing. Basualdo has used this material for site-specific sculptural installations before, sometimes using a motor or sound, adding a dramatic effect. But here the work is not overly theatrical; rather, the interiority of the object is brought outward by using the space between the sculpture and the gallery.

The art of Eduardo Basualdo is one of passages and thresholds: between the material and the immaterial, the visible and the invisible, the word and the thing and also between different moments in time – for these, the artist prefers the notion of limbo, conceived of not as a final destination for unsaved souls but as a waiting-space: the prenatal wait within the womb, the imminence of impending dawn. His work is designed to fill the viewer with the expectation of something else about to happen or to be seen, beautiful or terrifying, ready to pounce or fall, endowing Borges’ dictum “the aesthetic experience is, perhaps, the imminence of a revelation that does not occur” with full sensorial and even material strength. Man, in this conception, is an amphibian being, always on the verge of crawling out from the water onto land, from matter into spirit, from bodily organs to the mind, and then back again.

Basualdo’s works will, whether we want to or not, train our eye to perceive what is not there, what lies beyond. In his works (in his worlds) there is always more than meets the eye: and what does meet the eye is there to lead it towards this dimension of the yet unseen. However much there might be, there is always more: a chink in an otherwise solid door, some extra space and emptiness behind or beyond the continuous lines of everyday life, the ghostly image of what lies beneath the table or behind the wall, the visible shadow of the hidden blade.

His art constructs a peepshow into other worlds.

Eduardo Basualdo’s sculptures and installations have a strong influence of literature drama and film. In his early works – as part of the collective Provisional/Permanent – small objects, mockups and dioramas were used as starting points of shadow theatres made out of a choreography of flashlights, performance, and live music. The first of those shows – The House [2004-2008] –, staged for a reduced amount of people in an old building, required the physical intervention of the viewers and was aimed at impact on their senses in multiple and intense ways. Basualdo’s actual pieces preserve a great deal of that intensity. They are usually arrangements of sculptural objects interrelated and/or animated by a restless movement that extend their physical presence with changes in time. As in Oskar Schlemmer’s theatre, representation is powered by mechanization, and the human figure is replaced by a group of dynamic things that highlight motion, relationships and form. Nonetheless Basualdo’s installations are everything but abstract. They foster associations, narrative trails, mystery, and imagination.

Even his static works have frequently the resonances of an event. In them there is always the feeling that something has happened or is going to happen. When you see the shadow of a bird on a windshield it’s impossible not to reconstruct the incident beyond that mark. Fiction memory and imagination coexist, as they do in most of our approaches to reality and everyday life.

They are Ernesto Ballesteros, Ana Gallardo and Eduardo Basualdo. It is the latter that sits with me in a forgettable pub in the San Telmo neighborhood. He is the youngest of the three, he is thirty-seven, and he is going through a period of international visibility. We made the decision of getting to the point: to focus intensely on his works exhibited at the Biennial. To reach an acceptable depth, isolating them from the context of the event, and even dwelling on very few occasions on the possible relationships with his previous works. As if this pub, located 11,594 kilometers away from Venice, were an aseptic laboratory for understanding the object of study without any contaminants.

His presentation consisted of a constellation composed of five pieces: four in the exhibition space and an artist’s edition that he handed out personally. “In general, I work in my studio developing works that are similar to islands. I work intuitively with small and big concepts, and at the time of staging an exhibition I assemble a universe with them; that is when the story, which has an equal status with the other parts, takes shape. There is a touch of playwriting and a touch of curatorial work, although I generate the elements. They are concepts that linked to one another, structure one story or another. Enwezor invites me to show three pieces; the complicated part of the matter is that he does the same work that I do – linking pieces together – but not using one ́s idea as the center. What he chooses is not necessarily consecutive and I have to balance it, and there is where I offer him Grito (Shout). It is a work that serves to organize the space; in any exhibition, if you do not organize your own environment, you are demolished.” That idea included in the first paragraph, referred to isolating the work from the context, now seems to be an arbitrary wish. The fact is that in a chaotic biennial, with labyrinthine corridors loaded with literalities, with good works by good artists but badly showcased; with no surprises or emotional manipulations, Basualdo’s first good decision was to protect the curatorial methodology of his work; to allow the curator to choose, but to have the last word so that nothing collapses: to be the one who determines the dramatic structure.

Grito functions as a wall to trap the viewer; it is a protective work that underpins all the rest. Precisely, it consists of five iron bars stretching from floor to ceiling. In their centers, they feature paper full of folds; paper crossed by a broken line in graphite, the same
width as the bar. “How to find hidden spaces in a line and how to apply this in architectural terms. The pieces shown in Venice are practical exercises to test strengths we humans have to interact with the material world and modify it. In this case the question was how to break an iron bar using pencil and paper, and where to do it…this happens, from my point of view, in the plane of the imagination,” and he adds: “Reality becomes imprinted on certain folds, on certain structures that already hold certain traps, certain conditions which one ignores but which are there. The fold is already there, the territory is already conditioned, and the black line is your contribution.” Once again, the context: in a Biennial that is fundamentally pessimistic, where all those world’s futures are riddled with the violence of the present, with works whose strategies were the visibilization and direct denunciation of that violence, Basualdo appeals to a simple utopian basis, as if reminding us of what all this business of art is about: using the imagination, we can break reality. But he does not do so drawing rainbows. The iron bars are a support for the drawings, an architectural element, an underpinning but also an impalement for those drawings, or a prison grid – a typology already used by the artist previously. On the other hand, a clear violence is exerted on the material, the strongly marked line on paper forced to twist. “The paper is an X​ray, it becomes a lens through which we view that metal and we see it as a different state of matter, as in a dimensional leap. The Biennial spoke of the possible futures and the actions that we may exert on matter, the violence on the material is a way you have of building your own future. Of nor depositing it either in the hands of religion, or of technology, or of politics. What can you do to transform your environment? Violence is a component part of our creative engine. The work is finding out how to channel violence so that it does not destroy everything. I understand violence as something that is indisputable, a basic energy. In all of my works I seek and energy that may be in that state at the moment of exhibiting them, so that they do not represent solely a philosophical question. Violence makes you feel alert and it is a universal code, understood by everyone.” Basualdo’s works are clear and synthetic, but they are still endowed with a complex polysemy. Even if one should forget the narrative in Grito and move towards a self​referential reading of the visual language (the play of dimensions and materials, the relationship between topology and body, action and representation, drawing, sculpture, installation and architecture, among so many variables), the work, despite a pretended universalism, becomes riddled with a play of references for the Argentine spectator, above all local artists such as Lucio Fontana, Liliana Porter, Jorge Macchi or Luciana Lamothe, among many others.

While Grito is a protective work, it is in turn protected. Alba is its ideal companion: for an unprepared spectator, it rescues the former from a mere exercise of visual language to balance and return its narrative to it, expand its poetics. It is a wooden, free​standing door, which has been insistently sanded at the same point in both of its faces until it has been perforated. “If Grito ́s tool is the imagination, that of Alba is touch; the insistence of a minimum, physical gesture made with your body that may come to transcend the material limits we are used to dealing with. The limit that is physical, like a door or a barrier, becomes a temporal one. Your power is measured by the time it takes you to cross it, not if you can or cannot, since you can.” Unlike the hard, straight and prison​like bars in Grito, the wooden door appeals to a more intimate and romantic poetics. To cross your own barriers with an other, to cross your threshold. “ Alba is only one, Grito is multiple; it is a collective, the rule is for everyone and the evolution is personal.”

The senses continue their expansion, and not only thanks to Alba. Cómo volver a casa (How to come back home) is as simple as a paper folded down the middle and a line drawn with graphite pencil that respects the crease left by the folding. “here, the physical fold coincides with the fictional. I tell you what I want to tell you. Intention and language go hand in hand. It is a question of how to adjust one’s wish. If the world is exactly the way we want it to be, we stop bothering with a lot of things, for example, with safety, the number of devises there are to control the body. Human do not naturally agree with one another. The law does not adjust to behavior.” Indeed, the world functions like Grito: if the law is a line, if it is that metal bar, for Basualdo, reality is the paper with its folds and interstices, sometimes visible, sometimes not.

The last two pieces, Amenaza (Threat) and Juramento (Oath) work on the performative power of the word, its capacity for modifying the environment from immateriality. Juramento is a drawing on paper in which Basualdo insistently goes over the cutting edge of the knife with his ball pen until the paper is broken. Juramento features the same procedure as the door: a representation that becomes real out of insistence. But its function becomes real. It is a performative language; language equates to a physical fact, like marriage, an oath or a threat. Therefore, how can the cutting edge of language be represented in order to modify something? The invisible cutting edge of language is not material, but it has an incidence on matter. You can modify behavior through words. Here I intended to lead the viewer towards looking at the knife to see if it was actually there: to look at the invisible, to look where there is nothing to see, to concentrate on that nothing.”

To see that which is not there, to find the interstices, to move onto other dimensional planes of matter without stepping on simulation. Basualdo’s constellation in Venice has conceptual clarity and aesthetic purity, as well as the ability to performatize what the artist pursues: to focus on that which is not perceived on the surface; to go beyond the visible based on contemplation and rationality. They are synthetic works without relinquishing their interstices, their hidden corners, and their complexities. They work on something that is necessary because it is inevitable and sincere (in the artist’s own words, on the drive to control that monster in which we are submerged).