Our eyes adjust to the dark

SEBASTIÁN BELTRÁN, FEDERICO CARTAS, MARIANA CON, ROBERTO CORTÁZAR, PEDRO MAGAÑA, DANIEL MULLEN, FABIÁN UGALDE, ERNESTO WALKER

Installation view, Sala Norte

CURATORIAL TEXT

Observing distant galaxies and splitting the most fundamental particles has opened an impenetrable distance between the universe as we know it and our subjective experience of it. Human life, fragile, short, saturated with feelings, is in conflict with the loud and infinite silence of the universe that the scientific method has unveiled to us. A categorical juxtaposition of the subjective experience and objective reality, it seems, has never been more accentuated. How do we integrate understanding of our finitude with the knowledge of the infinity of existence? In the universe, every point of which can be precisely measured, where do we place our ineffable experiences like love, fear, awe, and sublime? Where do we address our mystical experiences, hopes, and questions in the world that, in the words of Joseph Campbell, “simply is”, silent to our search for meaning?

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Our Eyes Adjust to the Dark offers the audience an opportunity to confront the questions about our place in the ever-expanding world by fine-tuning our vision to new concepts made tangible through vastly different artistic practices and philosophies represented in the show. It is a look at our longing to be integrated into the world as a fundamental part of a human condition. 

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The exhibition takes its title from the line in the poem My God, It’s Full of Stars by an American poet laureate Tracy K. Smith. An elegy to her father, an engineer who worked on the Hubble telescope, the poem draws an image of humans striving to see through the darkness of the universe, augmenting their vision with science and their minds with awe at the scale of the cosmos. “We saw to the edge of all there is — / So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back”. Speaking of science in poetry, just as operating with its concepts in the pictorial space has been so rare for Western art, it prompted C.P. Snow to coin the “two cultures” term in his seminal Cambridge lecture in 1956 that stressed polarization of art and science into two opposite fields. As the exhibition shows, this separation is slowly waning.​​

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Each of the selected artists bridges our knowledge and our subjective experience from a different standpoint. The works of Daniel Mullen confront us with phenomena previously seen in scientific illustrations from academic papers. Rhythmic and poignant, Mullen’s works, however, offer not a pictorial but an experiential glimpse into these concepts, broadcasting a sense of awe and the grandeur towards a hidden world that engulfs us. This relational quality is characteristic of the works of Roberto Cortázar as well, although the focus in these works is shifted towards the human body, as the instrument we can read the best, even if it appears flawed and imperfect, as in his Cabeza Masculina en 3/4. In his other work, Teoria Oscillatoria, Cortázar offers us a look into Penrose’s conformal cyclic cosmology, an idea that the universe oscillates from expansion to contraction and back in cycles. Pedro Magaña invites the viewer to create personal mythologies and rituals rooting them in our knowledge about the universe. For Federico Cartas, the overwhelming scale of data we have about the world creates ground for celebration of our unique location in space and time, no matter how incomprehensible the continuum that surrounds us appears. Mariana Con pronounces this uniqueness as well, projecting it onto phenomena of a global scale. Her steel plates, depicting chemically corroded photographs of rivers and skies, contain 12 elements that constitute the atmosphere as if praising the unique DNA of our home planet and our phenomenological familiarity with it.

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While most artists approach knowledge as a tool in their creative process, some artists of the show focus on knowledge as their subject matter. The sculptures of Ernesto Walker appear as poetic statements to our hunger for discovery. With research based on the cartographic progress of the past centuries, Walker delves into our passion for recording the world and preserving our understanding of it, appealing to our almost childish amusement with ships, lighthouses, and travels to new horizons. A similar direction of connecting exploration of the planet in the 19th century with our current acceleration towards the stars is represented by Sebastián Beltrán’s sculptures that reflect on human tendency to draw connections from the experience thus making sense of the world. Beltrán’s Punch and Horizontal Time represent that exact moment when those connections led us astray, challenging our logic and everyday intuition. Concluding the show, the installation of Fabián Ugalde titled Molecular Disorder constitutes the evasive nature of our cognition. Appearing as a still shot of a Brownian motion, the installation reveals its pattern, or the absence of thereof, depending on the distance of the viewer and their focal point.

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Illuminated by the art pieces glowing through the salas of the gallery, Our Eyes Adjust to the Dark exhibition offers a plethora of approaches, or rather bridges, to connect the vastness outside of us with the vastness within. Perhaps we are not a mere witness to the events unfolding around us but ¨the universe experiencing itself. In that case, no amount of steps towards its great mysteries will satisfy us, as, in the words of Annaka Harris ¨there’s no traveling forward when you are the river¨. But setting pessimism on the limits of human cognition aside, we must open our minds as our eyes adjust to the dark.

Anton Meshkov

Ernesto Walker

Faro I, de la serie Lunas Falsas