The oxymoron is a literary figure whereby two concepts with opposite meanings are used in the same phrase to generate a third and resoundingly metaphorical concept. The expression “everlasting instant,” for example, suggests that, due to its intensity, an instant makes us lose our sense of time and seems to last forever.
The oxymoron is based on contradictory elements that work together to produce a new meaning, one that, though unrelated to either of the two that allowed it to take shape, partakes in some way of both. The oxymoron is a meaning-producing machine. But it is, at the same time, a deranged machine aimed at naming the unnameable: it always yields a perverse, metaphorical, anomalous and unlikely meaning.
It is due to these characteristics of the oxymoron that I chose it as the title of the show currently in the Espacio Contemporáneo. Oxymoron (the show) stands apart from the Giacometti retrospective with which it shares a roof and, at the same time, maintains a muted or silent, and barely visible, dialogue with the work by the Swiss artist. Let’s not forget that Giacometti as an artist is also an oxymoron: a classic avant-garde artist.
The works that Matías Duville, Jorge Miño and Luis Terán made for Oxímoron are fruit of each artist’s trajectory, not of a mimetic impulse. They are powerful interventions, indeed so powerful that they alter the perception of the space. These three artists are very different from one another in terms of their aesthetic proposals, supports and careers. Nonetheless, all three share a few common traits that, though combined differently, are essential to this show’s proposal: Duville, Miño and Terán all put stake in pure forms and (like Zen philosophy and Taoism) take a certain delight in the void.
The three proposals engage different spaces in very different ways. Matías Duville’s work, which occupies the stairs that connect the last gallery in the Giacometti show to the top floor of Proa, where the Espacio Contemporáneo is located, is based on a reflection on the passage of time, the way things—as well as people, situations and affects—wear away. Barely perched on the beginning of the stairs, it grows and grows, like a sort of inverted and coiled timeline that sheds rust as it ages.
The spirit of Jorge Miño’s work is global. It intervenes on the ceiling and the surface of the tables which, when one is seated at them, engage in a back-and-forth reflection with the roof. The work also consists of an enormous photograph which in itself is a labyrinth of transparent stairs and railings that formulate the idea of bounds and boundlessness. This photo is reproduced on the place settings in the restaurant, duplicating on the tables the effect it produces on the back wall. It creates an illusory abyss. Or is illusion itself abyss?
Luis Terán’s work makes use of the empty space that connects the restaurant and the bookstore. It rests on a single point on the floor downstairs and, from the restaurant, it looks like an object sinking into a void. Seen from the bookstore, on the other hand, it is an expanding tree. It brings to mind the poem by Rilke that contemplates the visions of a human being and of an angel:
The Angel’s view: Perhaps the tips of trees
are roots that drink the skies;
and in the earth the beech’s deepest
roots look like silent summits.
For them is not the earth transparent
against a sky full as a corpse?
This ardent earth where, near the springs,
the deads’ oblivion laments.
The materials used by Duville, Miño and Terán resonate with those that predominate in the Giacometti show (metal and void) and with the wood used to decorate the restaurant.
The works form part of and move away from the physical as well as the cultural environment in which they are seen. They are interventions clearly conceived for the space in which they are located: they could be nowhere else or, if they were, their meaning would not be the same.
Oxymoron squared: rather than giant objects, the works by Duville, Miño and Terán are tensions in the space. They produce emptiness rather than meaning.
Oxymoron
Artists Matías Duville, Jorge Miño and Luis Terán
Curator Daniel Molina
Coordinador Santiago Bengolea
Sponsored by