Desire is a Spiral
Text by Luís Enrique Zela - Koort
To envision the future is to dive into the past, for we desire what we know, and what we desire is what we collectively actualize. All of reality is self-referential, and so it twists and turns onto itself to understand itself. In this motion, a cyclical nature emerges, the ailments of the body and spirit are repeated in different contexts, our yearnings are those of planets and the cosmos, our dreams are those of stars and comets. The filaments of hot gas connecting galaxies are neurons and railway systems; everything returns throughout time, through scales of matter and thought. Desire is a spiral because it always returns to the same coordinate, in a different moment in time, just slightly different yet never the same.
Desire is a Spiral brings a collection of works that displace a linear understanding of our reality, establishing...dialogues across dimensions and temporalities. Works that collapse the apparent staticity of Modernity to engage simultaneously with the acute world of production and specificity, and the expansive, immanent world of natural and cosmic forces. The use of their materials, the sensations they conjure span across decades, if not millenia, articulating layers of sensibility to produce a kind of radical nostalgia. Yearnings that transcend a specific point in time, speaking of the entire human project and civilization on Earth.
Together they hint at the recurring questions and aspirations we have faced as a species. The awe in endless starry nights which eventually led us to the stars, the experience of a shared biological blueprint in contrast of unending differentiation and ways of being, the unfathomable power of Earth acting on spans of geological breadth. The political struggles of civilization that have raised and crashed empires. Desire is a spiral, because we are not that different from the first humans that appeared five million years ago; we are moved by the same impulses, the same emotions, we all are born and die within time. Culture has granted us the tools for more complex expression, but our desires still gravitate to the unchanging constants of human experience. The lessons of the end lie within the beginning.
The works of Elena Damiani and Jorge Eduardo Eielson exist clearly in this superposition, bridging the depths of the Earth and the infinity of the Universe. The continental tensions that fuse rock and the eternal passage of time; an alternate language to seconds and minutes, where matter is both the witness and medium for fundamental forces through a scientific and poetic perspective. The latex paintings by Elena Dahn and Luis Enrique Zela-Koort's blown glass engage through a sensual and critical discourse, the possibilities for bodies to exist beyond the limitations of modernity, the pursuit for symbiosis over virality, stretching the skin, manipulating the boundaries that define us. They also speak of the fetishization of the future, hinting at the boom in latex fashion in the 1950s in tandem with the beginning of the space-age, which birthed retro-futuristic aesthetics in the 1970s. Similarly, Jose Carlos Martinat ́s wall extraction presents an iconographic vortex over a degraded background, confronting the allure of political promises and the decay of infrastructure and institutions. The bright and graphic nature of the symbol clashes with its material appearance, further questioning the allure of progress since the disconnect between wages and productivity that occurred in the same decade and has defined our current state of economic dismay. Ernesto Burgo ́s organic paintings, like Eielson’s green knot, speak of unending transformation, exceeding representation, opting to embody the gentle oscillations that permeate all of matter down to the atomic level - rejecting a static perception of reality.
As such, all of these narratives reject the flatness of modern thought, the apparent epitome of the Zeitgeist in industrial modernity. They reckon themselves as products of a historical context, but understand themselves as part of the living organism that is History. They ride the bends and knots which curve the flow of time into spirals, unending spirals of intellect and consciousness.
Entrada actualizada el el 20 sep de 2023
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