Archipiélago

Travesía Cuatro presents its Summer Group Show Archipiélago featuring Sofía Bassi, Donna Huanca, John Isaacs, Eleonore Koch, Gonzalo Lebrija, Mateo López, Jorge Méndez Blake, Milena Muzquiz, Sara Ramo, Elena del Rivero, Mariela Scafati and Teresa Solar Abboud.

Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

— Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Whenever we arrive in unexplored territories, the mind is flooded with curiosity and traces in words and images the landscapes and artifacts that appear before the gaze. Regardless of the destination, an emotional need arises to save the moments in photographs or small objects that will serve as a pretext to narrate the fantasies of a summer that has already passed. Those warm months will be filled with nostalgia for having lived them and longing to relive them in the coming year.

Archipiélago [Archipelago] is a collection of works that shows how each thing becomes a symbol of the discoveries made about memories in peaceful times. One after another, the pieces are presented as islands of meaning, both for the artists and the viewers, who confront images that may not have been part of their visual archive but are deeply familiar and resonate in the collective imagery regarding the idea of summer. Archipelago is also the title of the piece by John Isaacs (2018), a pair of bronze spigots that meet in the immensity of the wall and instantly rust, summarizing the passage of a lifetime in a summer romance. Like those fleeting loves, the enjoyment and tireless search to return to those moments where you can re-encounter something you didn’t know was lost, becomes a motif through space: one faces the curiosity of finding idyllic places in the earthly chaos of the contemporary world, as Méndez Blake does in Utopia (2024) and allows oneself to re-imagine places that were one’s own for a single instant, as Eleonore Koch did in her contemplations of the horizon (Sem titulo [Caderno de desenho n ̊8], 1973) or Gonzalo Lebrija in his analysis of time.

From each place a memory is created that ends up materializing through photographs, gouches, oil or acrylics; but there are times when more than just the memory of a tangible space is needed, and possible stories are created in the warmth of the summer months. Impossible but archetypal landscapes are built through great seas of nostalgia, as Sofía Bassi achieves with Argonautas, (1969). Thus, memories of something not lived become present and allow us to find a close sensuality, often in the sobriety of black and blue ink strokes (Teresa Solar Abboud, Intraterrene, 2022) and others in the complexity of the layers of pigments, photographs of skins and various shades of ocean that become windows to times of cobalt tones, as suggested by Donna Huanca in POLYESTYRENE AGUAS (OO,23) #1, (2022).

Spheres of water - like Huanca’s -, air and time - like Elena del Rivero’s - follow each other through space suggesting that summer is part of a cycle that begins and ends. In the idea of this limitation, there is the desire for more occasions to fill the gaze with colors and to feel the grace of disconnection on the skin. For Milena Muzquiz and Mateo López, this grace often takes the form of occasional glances, of friends and people who have been a sample of animism (Mateo López, Rómulo A, 2023), while Mariela Scafati finds in lived materials the memory that she wants to preserve.

At the end of summer, animism takes hold of objects that can recreate connections with the spaces left behind. The black plastic becomes a curtain of memory that allows us to see the sunset (Sara Ramo, Portal ll: paisagem para horizontes, 2022) and in the blink of an eye, it is clear that time passes and the days, like the summers end . In the twilight is the reminder that it will take a year to make the landscapes of archipelagos, utopias, and deep oceans endure, rethink and revive.

— Travesía Cuatro

Image: John Isaacs, Archipelago (2018). Bronze, variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artist and Travesía Cuatro