Argentine artist Susana Cabrera * visited the exhibition at Fundación Proa dedicated to the British artist born in India Anish Kapoor, internationally recognized as one of the most important figures in contemporary artistic creation. Through her point of view we enter into the main aspects of this unique show in Buenos Aires.
“Unlike many retrospectives where the accumulation of works forms the exhibition, on this curatorial tour proposed by Marcello Dantas, you come out light. The quantity of works is precise since its forcefulness is such that each work implies the total presence of the spectator. The space that each work includes is fundamental as well as the sculpture-object itself. This ‘air’ allows remaining a long time in each work. There is no anxiety to jump from one place to another. The curatorial setting gives the possibility of having depth in the experience. In many cases, it is believed that honoring the artist is cramming with works when that takes away emotionality to the viewer. ”
“The show is very playful, arouses a sense of mischief. Textures and colors both Dragon (deep blue) and Shot in the corner and Svayambhu (blood red) make you want to touch everything.”
Svayambhu, is a structure made of red wax that is in permanent motion, building its own body, while Dragon is an installation made of eight river bed stones, Chinese, painted with a deep blue pigment. “It looks like something of an ethereal surface as if it were velvet.”
Double Vertigo is two long and curved stainless steel mirrors that can cause a loss of our sense of balance by suddenly changing our spatial perception and distorting everything around us.
“This work has an aspect of constant transformation. When I moved, a distortion was generated. The viewer becomes the object. ”
Susana explores different supports to work the invisible and the unconscious. “When I’m pregnant reminds me of my first times as a sculptor. But it is L’Origine du monde, the black oval, the work that is closest to my vision as an artist. Presence / absence, light / shadow, empty / full are part of the same fundament.
I identify with this work because at this moment I am very close to the words of the South Korean author Byung-Chul Han who in his book Absence tells: “The culture of East Asia does not know about dichotomously tensions between light and shadow. The shadow, then, gets its own glow. And darkness is given a clarity of its own. Light and shadow, light and dark are not mutually exclusive. ”
With works from 1992 to the present, selected by curator Marcello Dantas, Surge covers different series of the artist’s artistic production and a wide variety of materials used, such as wax, stone, pigment, and steel. It can be visited until March 2020 at Fundación PROA.
* Susana Cabrera is an artist from our “Break your Bread”. With her series of black and white photographs “Aura” was selected to represent Latin America in Sony World Photography 2019.
