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.

Kairos: Notes on the disassembly of a polyhedron

By Fernando Colman

Through how many faces do you spread, polyhedron,
the gentle melancholy that surrounds you.
With how many short edges
the glances that want to study you.
Through which cracks does it escape?
your quiet time
[…]
Who knows your back?
What rigorous deformity you hide
or you want to reveal and it is impossible

— Polyhedron of Melancholy , fragment, Joaquín Morales. 1985.

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Entering the Kairós exhibition, recent works by Osvaldo Salerno curated by Albán Martínez Gueyraud, is to enter and observe different elements whose ambiguity and sharp quality could be adapted to our time and uncertainty. We can begin the tour with the work called Velvet II (2020), made with a book that looks ceremonial due to its elements and decoration, made in some remote time. In it, two cavities can be seen, inside which the texture of human hair can be noticed. There were once portraits and gazes there that cannot be found in this entire exhibition.

Human hair as a symbolic element has a broad connotation, something was torn out and left us only the splendor of the frame, this hair element also escapes in other graphic representations, such as the lost lock of hair in Kairós . It can be seen on paper, as in Nuevo nace de la melancolía (New Birth of Melancholy , 2018), in works where fragments of bodies are seen, and acts as a signature, this series that is already noticeable in the Hand section, and surrounds the exhibition.

The work Shroud (2020) which is part of this series , dialogues with the text Mudanza (2010) by Veronica Gerber, in which she at one point analyzes the origin of her name, takes it apart until she finds a colloquial description: “Veronica, the truth of the icon,” the first photograph of the face of the son of God, according to her, is the shroud of Christ 1. This series of representations serve as self-portraits, as photographs of the human gesture.

At this initial point of the exhibition, it is clear that we are located in the West, the image of this pole of the world with its historical burden, largely Catholic. In this regard, we can agree with the idea that we are not with the images, nor with the works, even though we live besieged by visual information and never before have images been so imposed as in our time. As stated by the Venezuelan visual artist, curator and teacher Marcel del Castillo (2021), when he comments on the ideas of Georges Didi-Hubemann in When Images Touch the Real , we live within them, and in this case we are part of the works themselves, by taking these elements from our own imagination. Just as entering Kairós is realizing that the elements that are altered there are our own, we can see ourselves in them.

Many of the works exhibited in this selection were made in 2020 and 2021. Therefore, it corresponds to a recent production. These are years that, according to the Chilean researcher Jorge Sepúlveda (2021), we would never have imagined going through. The future we expected no longer exists. And in which absence has never slipped away so abruptly.

A poetic fragment by Hugo Mujica says that “a farewell is always palpable in every embraced body ” (Performance Biennial, 2015). The body is present in several works in this exhibition, in some cases as a tracing or matrix, pressing the vegetal fiber of the paper. Absence becomes a symbolic object.

We have this impossibility, the elements speak to us of a deferred time. The intentions of the gesture are absurd and are arranged in the hands, not in the gaze. The dominant visual sense that delimits property, that can read the law and apply it, that fattens the cattle , that turns the horizon into a single color, is not very important here.

Here, the gazes do not meet—I insist—but the gestures do; the only eyes present are those of the spectator, some minimal details and the security cameras. Eyes appear at the end of the path: one at the end of the path and others inside a mirror, they are the eyes themselves, in an almost perverse and playful game in the curatorship. On a piece of furniture there are figures of different hands of which only an expression of something that will never happen remains. The work Las palabras (2020) has two large cavities that reflect the dispossession: that hair torn from a skin, from a sheet, that leaves us naked, deforested, inhabiting the absurd.

And the exhibition progresses and severed feet from a nearby artist can be seen in a display case, various fragments dialogue with friendship, with other body parts that can be seen throughout the exhibition, like a forensic journey.

The Kairós line thus continues with a work: Espejos (2020) that repeats the cavities, the thing that perishes, but we do not yet see it. Something that is beyond our ability to grasp it.

• In the circular route, the exhibition brings us closer to the central point of what could be the origin of this dispossession of the beginning. The complexity of Aion 's time. It brings us perhaps closer to the condition of a male figure, like that of Albrecht Dürer, in a work made from places of enunciation that are also masculine. In The Wooden Book of Nuremberg (2020), a figure observes a polyhedron. The artist Osvaldo Salerno alters that form, introducing almost a protest, almost a political gesture, as if he were throwing arrows at the moon. Mockery or laughter as a subversive element, as a triggering agent of the deaths that occur in the turbulent plot of forbidden books in The Name of the Rose According to the researcher and academic Annunziata Rossi: “Subversive laughter in Umberto Eco's text, capable of overcoming and destroying the limited, classist order, which has no correspondence in the universe and therefore is contrary to nature” (Rossi, 2018), based on what can be considered an element present in the work of Osvaldo Salerno.

In this section and in Melancolía III (2020) the origin of anguish is mocked, folded and refolded. The alteration in Melancolía II (2020) creates a back, transcribing in lines with the manual gesture. In a series of conceptual showcases, she introduces an airplane and other hanging elements, which reinforce the idea of ​​mocking the inevitable. Towards that which Josefina Plá, since the interview that Adriana Almada did with her for La cocina de las sombras, said is a decree, which can only be answered with art (2015).

At the centre is the Aion section, and one realises that it is turning around something. Other elements are noticeable in the centre, a jeweller's scale that at some point measured vanity and the bust of a face, which names death, the being of a living person, according to the author's own words.

We are revolving around death. Stepping on the border. The time of Kronos. Revolving in the orbit of Aion , of death and of the inexplicable. Near the end there are gestures of daring, old books are taken, knives of people deprived of their freedom are cut and replicated, scattered in different shop windows. There is a phallic weapon that was part of an act of suicide. The kysé , disarmed, surrounded by threads, waxes and inlays, seem to outwit all possible sharpness, freeing them from usefulness.

At the point of Love, the internal showcase is full of archetypal situations, romantic love, perhaps made explicit in its decadence, with pins pointing to the flesh of the writing. And an external one, with the eyes and mouths abruptly sewn shut, which depend on an electrical connection, the visual sense and oral expression in this case are also denied in all their literality.

Finally, a homely rug invites us to stand in front of the curatorial text and the work The Gaze of God (2021) . There is a mirror that seems to make the viewer one of those invisible portraits of the blind photographer and philosopher Eugene Bavcar. A portrait of what perishes. An image that we do not control, standing in front of a body of works that breathe around us and observe us.