In this space we want to share award-winning texts highlighted by ASGAPA as emerging voices in art criticism.

We present the highlighted texts on the Kairos exhibition by Osvaldo Salerno, presented at Galería Matices under the curatorship of Alban Martinez Gueyraud .

Between time and existence

By Azucena Arvez Talavera

The clock rules the world, conditions actions, questions and governs meaning. Time leaves its mark on everything it touches, attacking existence with its eternal and constant passage. Time is built on top of that which disrupts its own rhythms, even from the fleeting nature of the moments.

Time seems to be one of the central themes in Osvaldo Salerno's solo exhibition, entitled Kairós. Presented at the Matices Gallery, curated by Albán Martínez, it brings together two formats of works: the first is a display case containing various intervened objects that dialogue with each other; the second corresponds to body impressions in black ink. Both correspond to different series that the artist has worked on.

The exhibition is divided into five thematic axes. These are entitled Hand, Aion, Melancholy, Cronos and Love , and they comprise a dialogue between mythological figures, which represent different qualities of time, existence and the body.

Salerno's works are formulated through the construction of objects, installations and montages that link mixed media; from photography, writing, drawing, objects rescued from everyday life –that is to say: from time and darkness– which he combines with body impressions, natural elements, nails, feathers, human hair, plaster casts, books and others, encased in wood and glass. The objects are arranged in an organized manner, some intervened, cut, tied, glued, decomposed, others hidden.

From the contrast, the fragmented body – the torso, legs, hands and face – leave their imprint by means of black ink that makes the human structure visible: the pores, hairs and scars that were canvas and matrix. The impression is worked from the monochrome and symmetrical organization of the body on paper, composing organic figures that stand out with the frame. Salerno’s series of body impressions appeals to an opposition between the volumetric human body and its two-dimensional imprint as a record of existence.

On white and grey walls that highlight the warm frame of the wood, the black contrast of the prints on the white paper, the bright colour of the pages of the books in the exhibition, they create a sober chromatic visual line, set with full and warm lighting that harmoniously combines the different objects on display. The spatial organisation is organic, due to the possibility of variable accesses that allow one to return from one work to another with one's gaze, establishing relationships with the connecting threads they share.

Osvaldo Salerno's works seem to invite reflection on existence in the face of the passage of time. Perhaps the impressions exhibit marks of experiences, which are not always related to intention or planning. Time also produces nudity, leaves its mark on the skin, matures within ideas, or not. Everyday objects accompany human existence, and become catalysts of ideas, memories, feelings; they lead to action and guide the representation of the world.

A diverse combination of objects – some found and rescued, others gifted to the artist – allows for the complexification of an idea of ​​reality, perhaps as an artifact of collective memory in which a spatial organization and occupation is presented that is foreign to the origin of the elements. These objects from Salerno can be read as a record of a time, where the moments are privileged in the construction of memory and the inherent content of each one of them is intervened. But the work does not close in on itself: it captures the gaze and challenges us to explore the open scene with imagination.

Each object immersed in a significant environment dialogues with temporality; it does so with human existence, which attests to its presence. Paradoxically, time is both eternal and fleeting; it can be visible in its marks, and at the same time intangible; it can be objective and measurable, but it is also a subjective experience.

Who has not heard that time slows down in old age? Is it possible that time lived is different from time thought? It is certainly a quality of existence. And the objects and traces left by bodies can constitute a record of it. The search to understand the nature of time has sought to dominate it, by means of the measurement of its duration and its division into particles; by means of its classification into an uncertain future, an elusive present and the past that is evidenced by means of vestiges. In the midst of a tension between eternity and mortality, human existence is devoured.

Perhaps based on concerns about time, Salerno's work establishes a communication with the fleeting, with the instantaneous, but also with a sense of opportunity. While time alternates the unpredictable with regularity, some discoveries offer company: they are objects that evoke lived experience, and have the capacity to alter bodies that, like canvases, receive the passage of time, and like a matrix, reproduce it on paper.