The Borders Are Fragile
piloto pardo is proud to present the first UK-solo show by Martina Quesada (Argentina, 1987), The Borders Are Fragile. This is Martina’s second show with the gallery.
When poet García Lorca was traveling in his youth he wrote a poem that began: “I shall not complain, if I don’t find what I am seeking”. He was referring to the idea that he might find something more than a preconceived truth, perhaps by looking for something else; in his words, he sought to “encounter the truth of the things that are wrong”. In a similar way, what Martina Quesada reveals isn’t the truth; instead, the vast possibility of the spaces in between.
In The borders are fragile, Martina Quesada presents two large installations, a sculpture and an audio piece. The title itself – far more than being a geometric, orthopedic, architectural, aquarian or dystopian concept – can be traced back to quotidian messages inscribed in the sky, in the glory of the past, or the invisible future. The person that Thomas Weaver would call “a generalist” is none other than an investigator, an artist or a creator that views the world according to what’s unspecific in the realm of ideas. My intent here is not to proclaim that Martina Quesada dismisses logic and heterogeneity; on the contrary, her lines and borders could not be less blurred. They are, in the fabric of her masterful artistry, not messy, but fragile.
Architect Alejandro Aravena speaks often of “the value of what is not built”. Similarly, in a rather geometric style, Quesada makes empty space visible. A grid of possibility. The roots of Quesada’s artistic practice can be, in fact, traced back to Argentina’s school of geometric abstraction, where artists focused on the exhilaration of action rather than representation. In her fragmented canvases, Quesada takes the action of applying pure pigment mixed with Argentinian native plants, which activates, along with the soothing sound in the background, a wider spectrum of the senses; a way of perceiving less visible forces. In the abstract world of dreams, from which the artist takes much of her inspiration, we perceive things in another state of being. The two figurative heads not only break with the geometric pantomime of the larger pieces, but describe the wordly state we enter when being quieted down, entering a parallel reality where, as the surrealist poet would, we encounter the truth from a different perspective.
Martina Quesada lives and works between Buenos Aires and Paris. Her work spans from sculpture, installation and video, exploring and examining the bridging areas between spirituality and consciousness towards less alienated states in relation to our current environmental crisis. Many of her works consist in the use of simple geometrical systems to explore the intersection between visible and invisible, researching on how to disarticulate functional viewpoints in order to generate new ways of perceiving. Her work has been extensively exhibited in Argentina, Latin America and Europe, including MACBA (Buenos Aires), National Arts Fund (Buenos Aires), Revolver Galería (Lima), ARP Porjects (Paris) and Marra/Nosco (Brussels).
