Armando Rosales Rivero

Gravity. Pressure. Collapse. Weightlessness. Containment. Touch. Inflammation. Puncture. Overloading. Vibration. Events that remain inscribed on matter, gestures of a scandalous body that preaches excess and signals transgression. Can a body communicate without resorting to words? Can it become a body that enunciates itself in a non-verbal way? Masa de avance, a solo exhibition by Armando Rosales (Cabimas, Venezuela, 1987), brings together a series of sculptures and a video, all recently produced works; some were created within the framework of a residency in Hamburg, Germany, and others within the confines of the domestic space, whose dynamics, forces and materials induce a vital weight to the resulting formal outputs. The objects were assembled from Rosales’s collections of found objects, an incessant practice of gathering that has characterized his career. Manipulating soft, warm materials –chiefly fabrics and foam– in stark contrast to hard, cold materials –brass, steel, stone and aluminium–, the works in Masa de avance propitiate an atmosphere in which symptoms of an uncertain condition irrupt, ones we read by their effects on our bodies. Such an encounter sketches a transit haunted both by the misfortunes of a disturbed body and by the transmutative potencies of the liminal.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a conversation between writers Fabiola Iza and Sandra Sanchez, published throughout the exhibition on the gallery’s website.

— N.A.S.A.L.