2023-07-16 06:00:00
Erratic and changing, the possible forms that roam the world appear, are transfigured and disappear in the diffuse contours of matter; For this reason, as a creator of forms (or conjurer of archetypes), the artist establishes a bet once morest the tendency of the universe towards indistinction and entropy: ally of the possibilities between the visible and the invisible, his permanent fight is once morest the indistinct -significance.
This anthological exhibition of engraving and mixed techniques by Sebastian Fund (Buenos Aires, 1985) allows us to calibrate the foundations of an artist living in Mexico since childhood, who somehow returns to an improbable origin, tracing a path from north to south that recalls the displacements and journeys of some animal species and archetypes that cross the continent, engendering new forms with one foot in the mythical and the other in the earthly, as expressed with historical rigor and knowledge of the facts by the Mexican historian Roberto Martínez González in his fascinating work El nahualismo: “In Mesoamerican thought, man was not conceived as a simple unitary being made of flesh and blood, but as a highly complex and mutable product of the influence of various entities and supernatural forces that acted on earth at different times. and circumstances. The human being is conceived as the temporary union of diverse components of different order and nature. Some are seen as material and extracorporeal; others as intangible and inevitably tied to his bodily envelope. There are immortal, hereditary and ephemeral; of telluric, celestial and infraterrestrial origin. They all have in common the fact that they are closely linked to the evolution and development of the subject within society and its supernatural environment.
Fund’s mestizo engravings –and whose workmanship demonstrates that impurity is more than an aesthetic is a mode of production– betray not only a macerated trade but also his own dark, lustful imaginary (with some very clear echoes of the work and the magisterium by Francisco Toledo), full of resonances that refer to the extravagant of creation, where some strange animals have necks that are too long or legs that are too short, unusual proportions that border on the impossible, amazing colors, variegated textures, macabre expressions and a quasi-supernatural presence in their large-format silence that besiege the spaces with old resonances as coming from another planet: for this reason it is not at all a coincidence that some of his zooanthropomorphic figures recall prehistoric beasts from remote times that, through their engravings, outline every morning of the world: not so much impossible figurations as unsuspected variants of a particular genesis.
With pieces taken from previous samples exhibited in Mexico such as Identity, Distant Footprints, or Bestias Negras, this bestiary in motion –which also explores the texture of waste in the most accomplished compositions– combines the techniques of engraving (xylography, collography and chine-collé ) widening and presenting the limits of its materiality, building bridges of dialogue to account for a multiple present. Rarefied.
This exhibition brings together anthropomorphic forms, strange fables without a language that communicate with unusual mental chambers; mestizo beasts misplaced by the traces scattered by the dance: that is why in these beings and in the graphic, ink and watercolor compositions there is desire and there is copulation: promiscuity and adjoiningness that reveal their fullness and power through engraving machines that allow one to feel the full weight of imagination in matter.
Among other avenues, Sebastian Fund’s animilized –and animalizing– creatures are also an invitation to calibrate the omnipresence in Mesoamerican cultural life of the species with which we have shared and still share the region, exploring their presence from ecological and symbolic aspects, as well as aesthetic, political or religious considerations that, although they start from a more or less biological perspective of knowledge, expand directly towards philosophy and epistemology, as shown by some recent attempts to analyze contemporary speciesist debates by part of specialists such as Bruno Latour, Alvin Kernan, Donna Haraway or Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.
Shreds of a sensitive mind, but above all authentic and coherent, this panorama of an artist whose imaginary perhaps borders on the distortions and elucidations of some beings arising from the hypothetical of Leonora Carrington, underpins with the solidity of his work that his is a bet that is resolved in another promise that does not give up or is consumed: Sebastian Fund or the imminence of an enlightened animality to come.
The hallucinated path of the nahual
Sebastian Fund
House of Culture (La Prensa Building)
May Avenue 575
Monday to Friday from 12 to 19
1689487580
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