Unfolding Modernisms (for future thoughts)

We contemplate the multiple possibilities that emerge during the construction of a group exhibition. We contemplate the multiple misconceptions that result from the design of a discourse that aims to encompass the perspectives of each of the works placed in dialogue. As a result, we view this curatorial act as a moment of suspension of the comfort of clear and transparent ideas, or rather as a means of questioning a development process that is open to doubt and speculative clarification of the ambiguous density of a reality that aims to be accessible and understandable. 

The possibilities of error constitute daily conquests for artists. Because discourses are anchored in their proposals, rooted in other-certainties that render the perception of the world more complex - as a changing and elusive entity. In the aftermath of a modernity subject to constructive desegregation - hopefully - the beginning of our century is experiencing the anxiety of questioning new social and political plans of unpredictable magnitude. We might say that the very foundations of democratic universalism are being shattered in the process of globalization - which was initially envisioned as promise of happiness, but was quickly and inexorably contradicted by the primacy of a nameless, opaque economy, that has neither aroma nor ideology. This process of de-ideologization orientates much of our everyday existence, whether through the falsity of an inert system of political representation, or the incomprehensible transactions of an economy and financial markets that are anchored in unprecedented speculation.

Let us return, then, to the possibility of error, of interpreting things in a deviant manner, of densifying meanings that artists can still offer us, in order to justify the motivation of much of contemporary culture. First and foremost, this affirmation is an act of poetic resistance. Language (of the visual arts, in this case), as the possibility of constructive disruption of its operation. Language as the creative overcoming of its rules and functions: poetry as a method. Poetic pragmatism.

It is nonetheless curious that many of the strategies currently being erected in the contemporary plastic discourse are willing to revisit key moments in the definition of a conflictual space of a modernity that is increasingly understood in its differentiated territorial dynamic, in the oxymoronic impermanence of its ideological substrate and the chronological discontinuity that defines its essence.

The four artists whose works are presented herein claim the possibility and the need to creatively reinterpret certain segments of this modernity. This doesn’t mean that they need to reaffirm certain principles, structures or aesthetic foundations. Instead it involves a critically repositioning of practical approaches and a poetic reactivation of specific episodes as expanded stories of a memory in permanent hermeneutic tension.