"Play to 3 bands" "Closed, not dark", collective

 

The CLOSED, NOT DARK exhibition approaches portraiture not only as a methodology capable of facilitating an exact type of expression or movement, but as a way of transferring such procedures to other areas of attention. This practice started in sculpture, continued in painting and popularized through daguerreotypes and photographs, whose link with other languages and media has developed different positions, is presented as a genre where each use implies a new meaning. Intertwining formal precision, fiction, and narrative interest, each of these photographs, images, and objects appear as updates to the medium, but also as other ways of speaking about oneself. When the questioning and affirmation of taste is the path towards the construction of the self, the portrait is presented as an indefinite language, as variable as performative.

 

With the intention of expanding a portion of reality through a situation that is less descriptive than climatic, in this case that of the city of Rio de Janeiro posed by Manuel Puig in the novel Tropical night falls,_cc781905 -5cde-3194-bb3b-136bad5cf58d_Gastón Pérsico (Buenos Aires,  Argentina, 1972) part of the literary portrait not to delve into exhaustive and symbolic descriptions but to build exhaustive symbolic descriptions between different scenarios and times the climate of a city, concentrated in the dialogues between the two protagonists. A selection of these conversations has been printed on different pages and placed on the floor next to a series of views of buildings or a text about a bar published in the Rio press, with the intention of composing a portrait that is as polyphonic as it is elusive. The set offers a small labyrinth of meanings where descriptive objectivity has been displaced. It is not the city but the climate that these phrases induce that demands a type of location. Between the architectural appointment, the scenography and the dispersion the artist takes care of replacing it. But also through external agents, such as the different postcards that have arrived at the gallery from Rio de Janeiro or the sentence that stars in the poster placed on the wall: "Now I am going to tell an even stranger adventure...", the first line with which Witold Gombrowicz begins his novel Cosmos. Two books, a first sentence and a set of them make up the indices of this research.

 

The agenda that the photographs de Roman Schramm (Germany, 1979)  hidden media that responds to the interest of the artist in investigating the hidden ways Graphics engulfed a notion of masculine style, assigning status to certain colors: white for office tasks and blue for blue-collar environments. That is to say, the dialectic established between commercial structures, advertising understood as an exercise in repetition, and culture, condensed from 1933 in Esquire magazine by its first editor Arnold Gingrich. Taking these areas of attention as a gestural encyclopedia from which to extract all kinds of developments and conclusions, the artist transfers, in this case, the plastic expressiveness of the portrait of people to the world of objects. Photographed most of the time on a colored or patterned background, similar to those used by 19th century photography studios as a simple response to so much demand. Schramm's objects are placed on a background that cuts them out, but these backgrounds, unlike their predecessors, in some cases are made through digital technologies capable of processing such images.

 

Between epiphany and hyperawareness of the incident, the portraits of Cecilia Szalkowicz (Buenos Aires, Agentina, 1972) stop where happiness becomes climactic, essential, corporeal. But preceding any chance, what the artist indicates to us is the enigma of what happens in the act of looking. This immediate present is translated into a series of objects, miscellaneous items and subjects photographed in black and white, but also in color. The presentation of which imposes a timeless effect that is reminiscent of both amateur cabinets and the first exhibitions in photography salons. As if it were a physiognomic portrait of two gestures, one hand turned into a sculpture holds up a postcard and the other holds it. Cecilia Szalkowicz specifies the medium, the visual is what comes after a circumstantial encounter, as unique and unrepeatable as the hair/hand that accommodates the neck of one of the photographed subjects and that responds to a light circumstance, where darkness facilitates a theater of transitory apparitions. Seeing how a set of recognition elements placed simultaneously finds in the photographic portrait the most immediate language to build such a grammar.