Are we awakened by that which melts us—the undefined images, the closed eyes? On Milagros Rojas

A cosmogonic force acts as a frame, a set of limits to what can possibly exist in the world, what can possibly be done, what good can possibly be pursued, etc. In this sense, each cosmogonic force—Technic, Magic, and so on—acts as the ground zero of a certain form that power can take.

Federico Campagna in Technic and Magic

Writing about art involves constantly returning to the cartographic question: how far is one to trace the narrative? In the case of this exhibition—perhaps even more so than in many others—the text must remain transitory and at a certain distance in order to avoid disfiguring the presence of shadows. After my own plunge into its underworld rivers of ink, my suggestion would be to resist the usual gravitation of words and listen to the echoes trickling in from the nocturnal horizon.

From the parenthesis opened up by Que el día se convierta en noche (“May the Day Turn into Night”) there emanate voices of equation, of oracle, from the boreal desert and the garden of philosophers, all materialized in a new dyed textile skin covering the gallery and draining onto the fabrics on which artist Milagros Rojas has embroidered messages of indecipherable writing, dictated from a chthonic fissure:

The fabric as a blanket, as a technology created for refuge, for sheltering and at the same time, in its ornamental character, for fashion;
the chains as symbols of technique, of the gear, of force, of the whip, of rust.[1]

Graphic heaths give rise to imprecise steel-gray geometries and occult black calligraphies suspended from the ceiling. A conversation about what lies beyond words—non-alphabetic, mutant, and illegible languages—interwoven by Milagros Rojas’s reading of the ideas of such thinkers as Mark Fisher, Graham Harman, and Federico Campagna:

Just as on the darkest nights—parties, movement, drugs, dim light, bodies—these figures are inaccessible, they can’t be translated alphabetically, they’re symbols. Magic remains latent, the integrated, the deformed, what slips out of the unequivocal sense imposed by technique. These forms, apparent codes, generate frustration, they can’t be read,
that gesture is the gesture of magic.

Curated by Sandra Sánchez, the exhibition proposes a spectral writing animated by a desire for opacity and impenetrability, a medium for signs of magic, one that survives clandestinely in an emphatically rational era, despite the imposition of a unique, unequivocal, transparent, and total language.

To think about the possibility of fluctuating alternatives in which to reflect on a more oblique state of things, of greater uncertainty and a less precise language, to understand the fusion between things as a possibility of escaping from a totalizing thought.

Let us then limit ourselves to walking along the abyss, resisting the temptation to try to bring something back rather than to recall the dissolution and embrace of the shadows.

Photo: Untitled (2021) 3mm acrylic sheet and chain. 40 x 21 cm.

— Cristina Torres

Translated to English by Byron Davies

*1: With the exception of the epigraph, all quotations, as well as this text’s title, come from the notes of Milagros Rojas.