martin bonadeo | texts

VU: In revisitsyou find and welcome coincidences between your work and you risk showing those similarities through the materials and themes that are based on previous work. What drives you to revisit those works and re-project them?

MB: Since the first time I met Daniel and Paula, I was really interested in the idea of making an exhibition based on our former works and shared challenges. But instead we decided to show the artistic thinking process we went through making those pieces.

DT: I think the coincidences woke up a curiosity in us about the others’ work, then we started to focus on the different ways each of us generate work from similar starting points.

PS: We look at similar themes but from our different perspectives and methods of working. Most of our work refers to previous work. Certain projects have been changed in format and medium, they are in a new exhibition context, and so they become new visual thoughts.
For instance I’d made an out-door installation pegging white bed sheets on a washing-line in a Canadian forest, then I took a photograph of it and showed it inside a gallery in
Buenos Aires. Later I made a drawing of that so it’s now become a new piece but taken from the same image & is being shown as part of Revisits.
In other words, the images are almost completed but not quite, so one can revisit and rediscover them again.

VU: How did you all come together for this show?

MB: We met before because of common interests and knew that we had to do something together but we were still looking for the right form. Olga Martínez, the owner of the gallery was in contact with all of us and suggested that we do a group show.

VU: Why have you arranged the work on nine trestle tables and only a few works on the wall?

PS: The choice to use work-tables was based on a wish to emphasise the selection and composition process of the show.

DT: We divided the space equally and each one laid out their work on similar surfaces.
It’s funny how we shared everything even down to having exactly three tables each.

MB: In addition we made sure that we wouldn’t have separate areas for each artist.

DT: Certain ideas were useful to link some of the works: the recurring horizons and landscapes, the color blue and the melting process. This was the axis from which to map our individual works.

PS: These initial directions that Daniel mentions allowed us to organize the material without having to subscribe everything to just one, singular, final idea.

VU: Showing your works on tables inside the gallery could be read as an intention to show less “finished” art works more than the creative process. However it is about showing your methods and sketches which are also a fictional construction, I mean, remaking new objects. In this sense what are the boundaries between an art work and an art project?

DT: Each one had a different relationship between object and project. In my case, I made a plan-scale model that captures the architectural space through the color blue and a circuit-drawing that tests the fusion of materials.

This medium gives me the chance to show different stages of the art process & not just the final piece and therefore I’m able to present, for example, my interest in the artistic process as a scientific experiment that isn’t focused on a particular result.

MB: Most of my work up to now has been multi-sensory installations, ephemeral & site-specific work that needed some type of formalizing apart from what I publish on my web-site. I found in Blue Prints a way of producing images that position themselves as a specific language between the project and the perception.

PS: Like Viviana says, in this show the boundaries between the “project” and the “object/art work” are blurred: what’s more important to me are the images that always show the way in which the work has been made.
I usually move & create resonances of imaginary landscapes conceived from urban life in an attempt to regain the intangible quality of those visions. The paper is used as the vessel, the container on which the water mark is left; so in that way some of those experiences still remain within the piece.

During the talks with Paula, Martin & Dani I discovered that some of their pieces seem to find themselves in each other (like when you meet someone almost identical to a person you know and they feel familiar and yet strange at the same time). These mutual connections are in the fore-front, without mediation, and they are precisely the reason why they have put this project together.

On the other hand, I couldn’t stop wondering about eclipses. I thought that an eclipse always involves three parts & depending on their respective positions in relation to one another, they will produce a different phenomena and illuminate us with their own light.
In three guided tours during the exhibition’s run, the artists will one by one intercept the others’ work through different interpretations, intensifying what’s visible in a reciprocal form, attempting new & unknown eclipses. VU

the artist's kitchen
by maria fernanda cartagena*

Three young artists revisit their own work in order to reflect on the creative process, the search for meaning & conventions of an exhibition.

It’s not unusual to hear of artists going back to old pieces in order to generate new, but what is unusual is using this setting as a concept from which to explore.
Revisits is the outcome of a premise conceived by three artists, Martín Bonadeo, Paula Senderowicz & Daniel Trama, after they were invited by the gallery “El Borde” to come up with a project that manages to deviate from the mandate of art work as a self-sufficient entity & product. More & more galleries are moving away from the idea that they are merely “housing” art work & taking on wider & more expedient ways of collaborating.
However this step is often a difficult one due to the expectations of both parties. If we take as an achievement of Revisits, the way in which one broadens the meaning of art, creating multiple perspectives from which to view the work & the potential that arises from bringing together individualities, then this show proves that the limitations of conventional exhibitions can be reverted in one’s favour.
It’s not about just any invitation: the artists devised a way in which we can enter into the intimacy of their process, displaying over nine work-tables the reprints of their thought-process, intrepid genre transpositions, alliances shared through the materials, techniques & searches for meaning that create areas of connection and disconnection.
Each one “edited” three tables that were interspersed in the space and mounted a two dimensional piece of work on the wall that reinforced their process. In this way the visit becomes at some point like the “after-dinner” moment, that preliminary boundary found in everyday life before & after social protocol.
A disquieting vagueness is hidden in the show. Instead of the trite “what are we looking at here, drawings, sketches, objects or sculptures?” It asks a more fruitful question, “what does it provoke or stir in us?”
Bringing these artists together is no chance encounter. They are artists that share a sensibility to the dimensions of space & time and have favored creating projects that are ephemeral & site-specific, environments or locations that regard the place or setting as both the container & the protagonist.

It’s sufficient to look back at their ambitious projects. Bonadeo curated Graciela Taquini’s “No Es” at Malba (2004) that captured a sun-rise over the Rio de la Plata river in jars filled with water from the Pacific ocean and projected a sun-set of a Californian beach. Trama was invited by Irene Jaiecsky in 2004 to show “Hogares” at the Museo Shoa. He drew the architectural plan of a house, not with lines but with words, testimonies and historical facts relating to life inside the homes of jewish families during the Second World War. Senderowicz recreated a fragment of landscape in ice for “Transformaciones azarosas” curated by Corinne Sacca Abadi at Malba in 2005.
In order to narrow down the field of work for this exhibition, they took as a starting point a shared obsession, the imaginary line of the horizon, not as a theme but as an experience that converts all of us into transitory subjects in nature’s rite of passage. The blues that irradiate from the tables come from this election, like strange islands that make up an archipelago with their particular environments, climates & cycles of energy.
The resonance and wave-lengths from these small worlds are so intense that individual authorship is diffused and the inter-connectedness reaches even beyond the gallery space. One of the problems that the archipelagoes pose is the delimitation of maritime space. In this instance vagueness is productive. Jean-Luc Godard in Elegy to love (2001) reflects on, amongst other things, the different stages of love, the power of impressionism in art and evoking the extent in which the images relate to one another he includes a leitmotiv in the film: “When I think about something I’m really thinking about something else. When I see a landscape, it’s new for me because mentally I’m comparing it to another landscape that I’ve seen before.”
Through the amplification of these singularities and differences and the union of their searches, for all that separates them, they generate meanings & affects while we walk, converse, delve deeply & think about their work. As the paths they open are many, I recommend three possible, convergent journeys.

Firs of all the freshness of returning to a primitive media and its materials and a projecting energy. In Senderowicz’s work she revives the subtlety and delicacy of the old medium of pencil and paint-brush as well as a magical and irreplaceable symbiosis of water, mineral salts and paper. In a similar way del calado (as ancient as la incisión, xilografía o talla), in a really beautiful scale-model that investigates a horizon through emptiness, light and shadow. Trama shows his note-book and his use of graph-paper as an infrastructure for organic landscapes. On the other hand Bonadeo revives the old technique of blue-prints, a printing process of negatives to positives that’s based on the light sensitivity of las sales ferrosas from which you obtain blue-images. Through this photographic alchemy he transfers his personal diary of sketches and projections (drawings, photos and notes) into images that in turn change into small, very abstract & atmospheric pseudo-paintings. These images are crystallized as retroproyecciones of his interactive urban & interdisciplinary installations.
Another route highlights the transference of energies and temperature in the complicity of art and science. Trama displays an enigmatic and complex system that’s self sustaining, based on alternative laws that agitate the hot-cold binary through fictitious recyclings. The cycle begins in a light-box that light up slides of glaciers whose silhouettes are transferred onto line-drawings and then onto cables that end up in one of the not to be missed pieces of the exhibition: a heater that melts a block of candle-wax, thus carving it into the topography of a glacier. Senderowicz turns to the warmth of the mineral mica. Its shiny, delicate brown coloured shell is hoarded, classified and recycled to build a kind of primitive, spiral shelter. Debris, like you’d find by a river, coexists with microscopic liquid landscapes in tiny tubes, jars and glass containers. Bonadeo’s blue-prints are indexes of colour and of water, cold and heat and all involve energy transference. For example, the huge projection he made on the façade of a building in which a candle melts marking the passage of real time between 2004 and 2005 was an intervention produced by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.
We can also access their universes through the exchanges and disputes around the understanding between the image and what is written. Senderowicz’s scarce use of words illuminates the deconstruction of landscape that Trama creates through language. On glass he prints instructions, sent by his friends, to photograph landscapes and the resulting photographs. Ingenious proposals about the use of H in the word Horizon and a jumble of letters spread on the table, contrast with the constant resource of Bonadeo’s writings, poetic pronouncements that accentuate the projecting character of his creative process.

The exhibiton is a feast that invites you to discover the reverberations of these three artists, facing the threat of what is real and its resistance to symbolism and meaning. Perhaps this explains why there’s a void or a loss or fragility that besets the show. Shattering beauty is reflected in the aqua-marines, indigos, lavenders, ultramarines, turquoises…trying to give itself a name.
(Revisits at El Borde gallery, Uriarte 1356 until 12th August. Guided tours by artists on Saturday 29th July & 5th August at 6pm.)

* Independent Curator- (Doctorate from University of Buenos Aires, Faculty of Social Sciences).

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