Enrique Minjares Padilla & Luis Ramaggio

Art Latinou invites you to the last guided tour of the exhibition Inflamable, with Enrique Minjares Padilla, the artist, and Luis Ramaggio, the curator. Register at this link.

in its state of greatest intensity,

movement is transformed into heat.

no one knows how to handle reality. the exercise of living is based on a strange system of synaptic

strange system of synaptic implications that complicate our existential acts and our naive way of “seeing things”.

existential acts and our naïve way of “seeing things.

culturally, we take it for granted that being-as-we-are is already an act of stability and harmony. that “we are fine".

But we are not.

the rawness of physical phenomena and the natural force of the earth and its organic structures make it clear

our chaotic “personal” composition is a mixture of substances and energies in constant tension; in dispute. as bodies, we are containers-packages, containers-packages, containers-packages, containers-packages.

as bodies, we are containers-packaged. because we live in a borderline, cosmic dimension; also composed of substances and energies that fight for -physically- subsisting.

at least, we are part of what we inhabit. we are made of the very thing that contains us. we are and will return to dust....

the space we inhabit is finite. only conceptuality and emotions free us from this confinement. even if we wanted to, we could not escape the body to other dimensions. the earth-terrestrial has us captive; enclosed, limited and above all: conditioned.

To what?

-To consume us.

enrique minjares transgresses-because-explores. his work has always been the documentation and plastic record of personal-dangers; of those obscurities that we all carry as masses in our unknown “personal interiors”. he knows them, and constantly observes them. he contemplates them. thus, in absolute surrender to the inner phenomena of the human “B-side”, minjares turns his work into a sharp vehicle of meaning, evocative yes, but never naive. his pieces vibrate, because they describe us. they blame us.

through his compositions it is possible to measure the gravity of our existential pain, or to reflect ourselves in that dual agony: because we are flesh and spirit we hesitate when deciding between good and evil. between what we want to be and what we can have.

this exhibition rehearses -from the visual study- the rawness of the combustible state, through real portraits (documentary appropriations) that perpetrate the peak moment of the fire. the personal and the material. but enrique does not seek to fatalize or make the viewer suffer. as in a temple, a hymn or a religion, his pieces worship the power of material transformation and the inevitable surrender to nothingness, which technically is caloric, it is fleeting.

we all, absolutely all, live in a state of combustion, of aging. more or less slow, more or less painful, but not as spontaneous and immoral as that of the fire.

the fire is -only- a fast forward of what is happening to us. let's worship the inevitable, because it is sacred.

we are cooking.

— Luis Ramaggio