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.

Put a mirror in Kairos – Conjure time in the present

By Leticia Alvarenga

Tell me, Muse, the story of the man of many paths […]
Goddess, daughter of Zeus, tell us also some passage of these events.

SONG I. The gods decide in assembly the return of Odysseus
The Odyssey , Homer, 8th century BC

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Under the title Kairós , a solo exhibition by Osvaldo Salerno has been presented at the Matices Gallery, curated by Albán Martínez Gueyraud, within the framework of the Night of the Galleries 2021. With recent works by the artist, the exhibition offers a look at Kairós, Kronos and Aión, three gods of Greek mythology, as well as other interpretations of mythological episodes.

In it, we come across a diachronic proposal, articulated in five thematic sections. The route of the space is free, leaving the spectator to construct the stories and interpret the works.

If Kronos is the time that passes, Kairos is the opportune moment, in which something in particular happens. This double definition creates a link, but also a contrast, between time as a quantity, Kronos, and time as a quality, Kairos. Perhaps this is because Kronos represents linear time and Kairos, as its opposite, would be the particular time or opportune moment. Its time is the right time to do something.

According to the curator of the exhibition, Kairós “is that resplendent moment that is immortalized, but in order to capture it at the right interval, we would have to be extremely attentive.” We could understand the pieces exhibited by Salerno as a kairós in the present, since even in art it escapes its limits and definitions. In order to understand them in depth, we must be attentive to their message or story.

Just as in Greek tragedies, myths teach us about ourselves; in his works, Salerno addresses the human as a central axis, reflected in the gods and heroes whose ends are inevitable. Thanks to them, society learned about universal values, about the forces of nature, about good and evil. In the exhibition, as with Kairós, we find ourselves before life itself.

In the exhibition space we become spectators of this kind of Odyssey like Homer's, in which he narrates the adventures and tragedies of Ulysses, where misfortune is also necessary. On the one hand, in the tragedy we can admire him, see him with pity and terror, and at the same time, have the feeling that what happens to him could have happened to us.

The artist works on cabinets/displays with which he shares a kind of puzzle, an enigmatic story of infinite interpretations and details. According to Simon Critchley (2001), classical works confront us with what we do not know about ourselves, and the same happens with Salerno's art; he takes the human being as the centre and lets us see his reflection, as if he were trying to discover the mysterious mines hidden within us. In almost all the pieces it is inevitable to see one's own reflection and, returning to Critchley, moral ambiguity, contradictions, the corruption of power, character as the driving force of our actions, personal responsibility... are issues that matter to us today as much as in Antiquity, so this exhibition could be understood as timeless, not only because of the continuous transformation of the same works but also because of the use of objects from other times.

These objects carry the particular burden of having belonged to someone. Most of them are elements close to the body. The artist separates them from that utilitarian purpose and reactivates them as pieces of art: gloves, knives, a piece of a lens, locks of hair or a small flower ornament that would mostly be rejected or thrown away due to their symbolic charge, out of superstition or uselessness, but in this case, it is the personal element that belongs to someone else that enhances or activates their capacity to be a work.

In the boxes we find these metanarratives that make us reflect on the passage of time of the human being himself. Through these pieces, the past can be preserved, revisited and even reinterpreted, overcoming for a moment, a kind of opportune time (kairos), the intangible and ephemeral of memory.

According to Alejandro Corleti Estrada (2008), kairos is the time of our transcendent moments, those that strongly mark each one's personal path and that, at certain times, made us take important decisions. That is what some call destiny, as in the work in which the artist uses an accounting book, on whose pages he says "Debit" and "Credit", with a pair of gloves.

On the sides of the room, we find, on the one hand, the impressions of living bodies, and on the other, the installations of hands, elements that again determine the passage of time, since they are the part of the body that we can see most in everyday life. There is also the work on “The Story of Love”, which speaks of our final destiny: as the hero’s last adventure is his death, we remember that, even in kairos, we cannot escape from it. That is why the artist, in the epigraphs, next to his name, writes his date of birth and leaves a space for the date of his end, highlighting what we will be, as Borges said: “we are already in the grave the two dates of the beginning and the end” 1 . An opportune topic to talk about in the midst of a pandemic, which in addition to a health and economic crisis, brought with it a great psychological impact. Perhaps, through Greek tragedy, myths and art, we can come to live with uncertainty and death.

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Literature

• Corletti Estrada, A. (2008). Kayrós (On scales, times, spaces and above all «Transcendent Moments»). A. Corletti.
• Critchley, S. (2001). Tragedy, the Greeks and Us. Madrid: Turner.
• Homer. (2017). The Odyssey. Austral.