Beetle in a box, also known as the private language argument, was coined by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein to explain the difficulty that human beings have to understand what goes through the minds of others. This, because when we express ourselves in public, thoughts are inevitably mediated by language or other forms of communication. So this work, composed of 10 paintings that together and stacked fit in a yellow cubic box, tries precisely to reflect on this paradox. That is why once out of the box, they do not have a single way to be installed, but, on the contrary, they respond to a puzzle game in which the wall and an imaginary grid of 4 rows and 6 columns, serve as support. The 10 paintings were done with all the remainings acrylics that I used during a 2 years MFA program at the Painting and Drawing department of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Symbolically this condenses all that academic experience into layers and layers of paint that I could travel with.
Artbo (Bogotá art fair)
Artbo (Bogotá art fair)
This project takes its title from a personal anecdote around a travel to Uyuni, a small town in south Bolivia, which is the point of entrance to a natural park that includes the largest salt desert of the world, as well as other particular landscape sights: red lagoons, an island of cactuses, sand dunes, gigantic plains and rocks in form of trees. The dilemma, or thought experiment, in this case, has to do with the impossibility to recreate a specific moment from that trip, let’s call it a sublime moment, and try to record the whole experience in my brain. Now I wonder, is it possible to address a memory just by thinking of it, or by thinking in similar memories? Can that memory can be as powerful as the original experience? Can it be better, different, worst, more unique? Can those questions be transformed into visual problems for an audience that doesn’t have anything to do with that story or context?
Within Receding Horizons, Sullivan galleries (SAIC)
Within Receding Horizons, Sullivan galleries (SAIC)