"TOO MANY THINGS" Sebastián Boesmi - NDG 2024

The expansion of too many things

Boesmi's Too Many Things exhibition, to be shown at Galería Matices, covers clearly defined fields of techniques, materials and procedures: paintings, 3D prints, sculptures and video. However, the transmedial nature of her work not only establishes secret links between these areas, but also makes them continually overlap, blurring the boundaries; creating intermediate, wavering zones and even opening up new spaces. This expansive vocation is one of the characteristics of Boesmi's work: painting runs transversally through all of her production; as does the use of technological devices and sculptural objects whose forms circulate in different directions, naturally crossing the boundaries of those areas. This unstable interweaving conditions and expands the specific field of the different proposals, which become site-specific pieces; installations, in the broadest sense.

The continuous transit between diverse media and their inscription in a contingent space presuppose, on the one hand, the action of shared concepts; on the other, they reveal the putting into action of one of these concepts, fundamental to his work: the idea of ​​movement and incessant becoming, of mutation and crossing. Everything is boiling and moving in this work, disappearing and reappearing; it allows us to glimpse the other of each form, the aftermath of every moment, the background and the beyond of one place and another. The diversity weaves plots that, in turn, are fluctuating and push the figures out of themselves, preventing any stable position, any rooting or accommodation in space.

Boesmi intensifies the most characteristic faculty of the image: that of establishing links between different, opposite and even contradictory terms. The image relates what is with what is not and, from this strange paradox, puts the real and the virtual on an equal footing and links the actual and the possible. This multiple capacity of the image allows us to connect mechanical or manual work with technology, as well as to equate graphic, pictorial and spatial operations and to reconcile the organic and the inorganic. For this reason, the development between different physical, technical and even ontological realms – a central issue in contemporary art – does not imply a forced operation for Boesmi: images slide or make their way, adapting to different contexts and, at times, blending in with each medium. Thus, they alter and transform their figures and are partly identified with others. These crossings are not necessarily peaceful; they often involve confrontations and provoke conflicts that are not always resolved; in the latter case, the tensions between opposite forms remain latent. converted into energies that nourish the work, push its differences from within and revive the presence of its different proposals.

The protean qualities of the image allow the artist to work with the third dimension of sculpture using the same chromatic criteria and materials used in other procedures. He does so by assuming the technical particularities of each medium: the sculptures are made with bioplastics from the fermentation of cassava and corn, combined with ceramics and printed in 3D. Just as Boesmi explores and exploits the skills of the image, he also investigates and takes advantage of the possibilities presented by technology in the most diverse fields. But, once again, technology does not appear separate from other means of production of work and acts in collusion with craftsmanship. The sculptures are made by hand and constitute unique pieces. They are created by overcoming the already old dispute between craftsmanship, technology and art.

At one point, sculpture moves on the edge of the three-dimensional and even goes beyond it. Sculptures made with neon and suspended on walls are nourished by light, they appropriate its essential principles (intensity, ephemerality, versatility) and, without abandoning the memory of lightning or loosening their links with color, they become related to writing: to the street graffiti of Asunción, the simple numbers of a city that represses its cries. This relationship produces other displacements: the image-text becoming of sculpture; but also, and mainly, of painting.

Boesmi’s painting occupies a limited but half-open area. Perhaps its singularity, and its autonomy at times, are defined as much by the narrative of his proposals as by the specificity of the technique. The artist creates invented spaces, halfway between dreamlike figuration, calculated discourse and unleashed fiction. They are landscapes or dimensions with no references other than their own shapes and colours. On the one hand, these places – dystopian at times – are inhabited or crossed by abstract signs or clearly representative forms, disconnected from each other, detached from any support (mutant animals, human profiles and truncated objects). They are beings with indecisive contours, incomplete organisms or in the process of formation, perhaps spectral signals: the secret passages between the environment, human subjectivity and the digitalisation of the world produce intermediate stages, sketches of bodies in transit. On the other hand, the abstract strokes that boil in the work aim to become part of writing; they are letters or post-verbal graphics, fragments of statements or numbers of an unknown language provided with the same expressive value as colors, textures or shapes. The painting itself must be approached in the key of the great ritual of passage that is Boesmi's work: it projects itself beyond the flat and the objectual and enters into unreal domains governed by virtuality without abandoning its pictorial identity.

Virtuality. It is strange that an artist so attentive to the density of nature, the challenges of matter and the situation of human beings in the concrete world, should enthusiastically dedicate himself to exploring the possibilities of the digital image. This eagerness is justified when we realize that part of the expansion of painting takes place through the leap from the canvas to the screen. Painting is, after all, a laborious manual process that encourages us to look beyond what is visible and, therefore, enables us to interpret reality (whatever it may be) both through plastic strokes and pixels. The off-screen that art enables forces us to imagine the other side, appealing to all the resources that sharpen perception, investigating all the systems that culture facilitates in each time. Boesmi glimpses the parallel scene supported by the power of imagination and the subtle breath of humor. Sometimes, irony produces detours and opens gaps that allow us to look at the theatre of the performance from a certain distance and glimpse the passages that link it to its outskirts. Other times, the scene itself ignores the limits of the curtain, goes beyond the arch of the proscenium and pushes us to jump outside the walls: the place of the performance coincides with that of the audience. His postulates of interactivity of the work and, therefore, Boesmi's challenge to the merely passive role of the spectator, lead him to cross the threshold of the image, enter the outer space of the stage and promote the participation of the public through workshops and other activities additional to the exhibition. With this pragmatic movement, the artist does not complete the creative act, necessarily unfinished, but nourishes it with a powerful gesture that, once again, drives the image to expand its reach beyond the closed domain of any medium.

Ticio Escobar

Asuncion, June 2024.