Marcela Gottardo

Arte Expuesto presents The Demiurge: Time in Space, a work by Marcela Gottardo that can be seen in the panoramic screens of the city as part of the exhibition route of the month.

The work emerged while I was meditating about the various ways that the hand has been portrayed in human culture throughout history, from the negative prints of hands found in Palaeolithic caves to the Indian Buddha mudras, hand gestures, and finger postures, Michelangelo Buonarroti's alfresco "Creazione di Adamo" in the Sistine Chapel, the hand compass of William Blake, and Marcel Duchamp's printed hand.

An ancient trace of a hand in a cave points to its resistance to the destruction of time, but also it tells us that we are time.

We can think of time as external space, the time it takes from one point to another, or that phenomena constitute time, and we can also think of time as internal consciousness, the horizon of being itself.

In my previous exhibition for Arte Expuesto, Fragment-Whole, 2023 I also utilized the negative print of my hand as subject. In my perspective, the subject of the hand in art essentially points to the different ways human beings have historically represented Genesis, the divine through myths and stories.

I posed my left hand against the corner of my studio and took a picture. I printed the photograph and allowed it to sit on the floor of my bedroom for many days observing the sun's light creating shadows from the window, I decided to add the spheres I’d made in clay on top of the image. The spheres were not meant to be perfect; they are more or less the size of the hand and retain the process of making them. They are representations of an ideal form as it posits Plato. The colors were purposefully chosen to represent the four psycho-physical elements that constitute our totality as beings according to mystical texts and contemporary psychoanalysis: water is green represents the mind, fire is red represents the spirit, the air is blue represents the soul, and earth is brown represents the body.

The hand gesture represents a conscious act.

Once the image of the hand was printed it became objective and set the stage for the spheres. The sun's natural light created perpendicular and oblique shadow shapes activating all the elements of the work appearing as forms and disappearing as matter revealing its essence, in pure form. Formalism, as I see it, is the essence of form in matter, or the fundamental structural quality of matter, which is its representation.

This appearing and disappearing of form and matter is immediate, there is no before and after and it can not be considered one thing transforming into another thing but events happening.

The work is not an object, it can’t be lifted or moved around, it depends on the natural circumstances of light, and it is unstable. It only exists as a third and fourth image, a record of actions, and traces, performed at a certain time and space. The vertical image becomes a horizontal object only to become a vertical image again holding all the transition processes creating an interior sense of gravity or time.

The Demiurge, a philosophical and at the same time mythological figure, is a divine being, endowed with generative capacity, described for the first time by Plato in the Timaeus.

Creator and father of the universe, the Demiurge is in the Platonic myth an ordering, imitating, shaping force, which vivifies matter, giving it a form, an order, and above all an Anima Mundi.

On a philosophical level, the Demiurge corresponds to the need to introduce a unitary principle capable of justifying and overcoming the rigid dualism, theorized by Plato, between the world of ideas and sensible reality.

This divine craftsman therefore represents the mediator between the intelligible dimension and matter, an otherwise inseparable dualism. The demiurge is in fact the intelligence that designs the world, looking at ideas as a model and using matter (or chora) as a tool.

Platonic ideas are eternal, necessary and precede any temporal origin. They are the object of true intellection as "pure form". They are therefore exempt from generation and corruption, unlike the sensible world which is on the contrary generated and corruptible. The sensible world, subject to becoming and generated, must necessarily descend from a principle since there is no generation without a cause. The Demiurge, being inextricably linked to the idea of Good, cannot but create the best of all possible worlds.

Although having the hyperuranic ideas as eternal models, the Demiurge is linked to the "ontological minority" of the sensible world. The Demiurge therefore does not create ex nihilo (out of nothing) but is forced to operate by transmitting the ideal form to a pre-existing matter.

This artwork reminds me that artistic actions are demiurgic actions, divine, or conscious actions. In this moment the soul becomes aware that the Kosmos is already perfect and in this confine, it finds itself free to play and is aware of itself.

Consciousness is not synonymous with rationality as we might think, it's everything because there is only everything, but conscious actions are synonymous with ethics. And ethics is not a code of rules that we can find in the world, it is much more impersonal than that.

I chose this piece for Arte Expuesto to create a space for contemplation in the everyday life routine of the city. We have become so accustomed to distractions, activism, and government propaganda. Feed by exterior images we are losing the capacity to create internal images, forgetting our essence

— Marcela Gottardo