Diego Ascencio Fuentes

Proyecto Arte presents Objects in space by Diego Ascencio Fuentes.

The need to protect memory appears as an urgency that cannot be explained about the past of others. Save, file, collect, narrate; These are actions that could define the anguish for perpetuity in the face of the insistence on forgetting the past because of the present life, and the insistence on the memory of the past life that revitalizes the present. As a display of interconnected and complex cultural processes, the need for the reiteration of a past fades into the fantasies of our shared memories. Dionysian ritual or liberating catharsis?

The appreciation of the works of Diego Ascencio Fuentes takes shape from the emotions that are protected within an affective bond, and from an axiological progression, the object becomes an image and the image an object. Ascencio's recent work

Fuentes becomes the existent among other existents, as it materializes as a concept —within the qualities of memory and time— that constantly metamorphoses, and therein lies its infinite potential; for it traces, like an action, realities that will fade into the infinity of memory.

Objects in Space is an exhibition that focuses on the recovery of fragments of a contained memory that the artist recovers from his various personal journeys, which become elements that are represented in pieces that, as an act of subversion, stop the oblivion and refuse to remain silent and euphemistically demonstrate deeper issues in the visual representation of archive and memory. The transcendence of the pieces by Diego Ascencio Fuentes in this exhibition are related in an indirect dialogue with the closest questions that surround the world of the ephemeral and that are provided with elements that transit between the image, the object, the dialectic, and the paradoxes of time and memory.

Pieces like And I put them in boxes (2022), a series of sculptures made of concrete that shelter random objects provided by the viewer, dilutes the symbolic identity of the work, and determines its habitual relationship with the abyss that emerges when the object is sheltered inhabits a general fantasy and is faced in a "dialectic" that carries any significant memory. In the same way, Swore I could feel you through the walls, but that's impossible (Germantown NY) (2021), is a series of images that ratifies the poetic processes of finitude that recreate a duality between absence and permanence.

In its most personal relationship, it is no coincidence that pieces such as Room of the house (2022), a series of ink and acrylic drawings on paper, recreate a narrative of self-construction with the memory contained within the living space, giving the piece a very emotional meaning that materializes the memory of an experience, not as the act of having been witnesses, but of having been part of an event.

Finally, and as part of an existentialist allegory, Endurance/Turmoil (2022) is a lightbox with one of the words written on each side, which grants a double function within the resources of the artist's production, for On the one hand, it represents the dissolving processes of the “judgment of existence” —where things that are organized logically constitute; in the strict sense, the order of reality—become uncertainty in the shadows, and on the other, it represents a language that pursues the limits of memory, identity, and transcendence that comes after the search for an affirmation of being and belonging.

The experience of appreciating the works of Diego Ascencio Fuentes is solitary, but not individual. Regarding his recent work; the particular interest and curiosity about the processes of detachment from memory that take refuge within melancholy is perceptible. The work of Diego Ascencio Fuentes is not distinguished in an interpretive appreciation of a romantic gaze regarding memory if it can be described as such, since his works penetrate our thoughts and merge with the memories of those who look at them.

— Félix Feria