Chavis Mármol

N.A.S.A.L. presents Chavis Mármol's solo exhibition, The Dark Place of Desire.

Visiting the dark is moving away from the surface, away from the touch of simple and direct light, to be immersed in the depths of the body and time. It is going there where not a single ray of sunlight reaches, that suggestive dark room, a prison, or a house with long shadows and a dancing bonfire; for queers, the majority of us, remembering our childhood is returning to the night of identity. It is returning to the chains and bonds that kept us repeating compulsory heterosexuality and its generational traumas. And yet, with a certain poetic circularity, it is also there where the answers are found to who we are, why we love as we do, and what the secrets are to being reborn. In all philosophical readings, Desire has never come from some transparent place. But on the contrary; in a psychoanalytic sense it comes from absence, or for some Deleuzian it comes from the transcendental outside as a mobilizing force. In all its forms, Desire hides itself, it rejects a static explanation, so its origin is a singularity that twists any logic, one that boils when the sun goes down.

In The Dark Place of Desire Chavis Mármol proposes, through visual allegories, a return to the nucleus of his identity. The memory of his two homosexual uncles, cartoons, the discovery of pleasure. A journey that begins at home with the repression of the sexual impulse, then an image - the possibility of being something different. And finally the experience, the manifest will in existing outside the lifeplans that were forced onto us at birth. In that dark place of vaporous silhouettes, Chavis shows us the strategies he used to assert himself before the world, like someone trying to stand up in a basement with the lights off, groping on his knees, touching first timidly and then firmly the undefined bodies around him, until feeling the way out.

The works on display articulate the present and the past, memory and craft. With an intensity that goes beyond the narrative, they invite us to be an active part of the construction of the subject. Their materials, their expressions and imprecise organs, everything is in a kind of sustained production. The affirmation of a constant evolution, approaching art as a space to reshape oneself, from where we draw the strength to be rebuilt, with the forces with which one sculpts marble or welds a grille for a window. Here, recurring symbols emerge; the hands that give shape to matter, agents of curious and erotic touch. The teeth, which appear in forensic identification, confronting inherited and constructed identity. The shackle, restrictive elements that hint to a certain fetishism, and also to a possible liberation.

Every origin usually occurs in the dark, as in the womb or a seed, the blood flowing from the core of the bones to the throbbing erection. Here that Desire is launched towards the world like an explosion, transforming everything in its path.

— Luis Enrique Zela-Koort