There is an extensive series of drawings where Basualdo describes how the issues of this world arrive in his mind, through his retina. He presents different heads, almost all in profile and with highlighted eyes that multiply. There is the process of mental elaboration of the external universe and its passage to the interior. The artist’s eye, the most sensitive organ, establishes an interrelation with ideas, sensations and feelings. But the optical phenomenon of looking and its drift into knowledge or art can be an exercise as dense as it is distressing. And Basualdo represents it very eloquently. What other explanation has a dense black spot that invades an entire head? In the rooms of the drawings, sloping walls dislodge the viewer.
When analyzing the exercise of looking, John Berger observes: “We only see what we look at. And looking is a voluntary act, as a result of which, what we see remains within our reach. We never look at just one thing; we always look at the relationship between things and ourselves. Our vision is in continuous activity, in continuous movement, continually learning the things that are in a circle whose center is itself, constituting what is present to us as we are.
Indeed, our knowledge, experiences and beliefs determine the way we understand and appreciate things, art and the world. A gigantic black shape made of black fail (very thin aluminum), brings back the memory of the enigmatic objects that Basualdo hangs from the ceiling, similar to the “things” of the creator of the “Menesunda”, Rubén Santantonín. Basualdo recognizes the relationship between his previous works and the installation. So, he clarifies: “It is the same form that is now open”. And he invites us to surround her to discover her darkest side. Behind an immense and ambiguous black form appear lifeless bodies: a tendal of dead. The scene is comparable to that of the mummified bodies of Pompeii, the victims of Vesuvius paralyzed in a vital gesture by the hell of the volcanic lava.
Basualdo’s works may contain an environmental message, but rather they invite us to discover the post-apocalyptic feeling of seeing what remains after the end. Victoria Noorthoon, director of the Moderno and curator of the exhibition with the collaboration of Alejandra Aguado and Clarisa Appendino, maintains in her text: “The artist’s eye turns outwards to contemplate the same figures that until then barely nested in his nightmares in the recesses of his imagination, as if the caverns of the brain could no longer contain that malignant boil.
The viewer who went through Basualdo’s nightmares can find a place close to paradise in the great room in the second basement of the Modern.
Morelos
“The place of the soul” is ambitious. He invites the viewer to engage in a dialogue with nature, to walk the paths of the enormous and sensual installation that he erected in the Museum, immense walls of adobe scented with aromas of Colombian tradition: cinnamon, cloves and coffee.
In the genesis of this installation, the historic work presented in 1968 by the conceptualist Walter de María in a gallery in Munich appears as an unavoidable reference, and finally, in The New York Earth Room, an apartment in Soho, where more than 100 tons are exhibited. of Earth. The space, in full restoration, will reopen in 2023.
The Morelos installation, like that of De María, appears isolated in time. Gone is the noise of the streets, the vertigo of populous cities. The earth is a material that summons silence, its mere presence imposes a certain calm that enhances the mysticism of Morelos with its tribute to the Pachamama. “What treasures my memory is sacred, it has become so. They are the gestures that are now repeated and honored, the sacred gestures of generations of women that are updated in me and overwhelm me”. And there it is and you can hear, says the artist, “the sound of the earth”.
Source: Ambito
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