Sandra Gamarra by Carlos Trivelli

to the right,
I saw a small color changing sphere,
with and almost intolerable fulgency.
Borges, El Aleph

A rapid look at our current situation makes evident two important trends in fine arts. In one side, a continuously growing professionalisation of spaces, institutions, markets and finally, of the actual artistic production. On the other, the development of spaces dedicated to structures which are more complex and for a larger public. It is on the same bases of both trends that LiMac acquired sense and reality.

In the first case, the world gallery trend, art centers, museums, fair and biennials dedicated to the professionalisation of the market establishes patterns which evidentiate our local needs. The lack of spaces which are accordingly articulated and institutions which enable the rationalization and assimilation of local production in terms of a construction of the present image and the conditions for it to create a passage from its conversion in memory and lack of a future production, has been identified, in our area, by the absence of a long promised and up to now almost utopic museum of contemporary art. In this sense, LiMac evidentiates its needs and signalizes with certainty and irony that which we are in need of. In the second scenario, the constant trend of emptying these spaces from a sense of the individual works with the objective of the production for a horizon of artistic discussion directing to more complex spaces, with a series of works, complete exhibitions and even combined exhibitions – which, for example, is the case of biennials which are articulated thematically – open the possibility of considering LiMac, to the museum itself, in the same terms, as an instant of enunciation, as a work of art in itself.

Both trends, as evident result, come together to make LiMac a double need: as a mirror so that we can see our institutional nudity and as an image of the complexity and of a class which can and should acquire at least part of the contemporary production: if there are no spaces or discourses which enable it, this is precisely the task (or at least one of the urgent tasks) of current production.

Appropriation Space

LiMac’s project is not only an engeneous game, but not another critic discourse. Its solution, in some way, does not reside only in the contingency of criticism or on the evidence of needs. As per the contrary, it resides on a luck of condensation of the art system which makes possible all in one space. A small aleph of the artistic universe. (in literature, writer Jorge Luís Borges denominates “Aleph” as the area where one can see all the other areas in the universe). Looking at the trends which seek to expand art domains, taking art to the streets or intervening artistically in public spaces with the idea of extending a system of aesthetic and criticism values to other spheres of society, LiMac works better when looked at the inside: instead of appropriating itself of new spaces, it establishes, in the same breast of artistic institutions, an area of appropriation of the artistic system in its entirety.

LiMac has been a museum inside a museum and now, as in its foundation in 2002, returns to being a museum inside an art gallery. It appropriates itself of its exhibitions rooms as any work of art, but when doing it, and not without this failing from being a museum, converts itself in an object – thematicises itself – with what creates a sort of gravitational force which drags all of which is in the exterior of these rooms: Here are the works, but in these works are reproduction of other works. In the reproductions, the original pieces and the visions of those which contemplated them. Also present are the institutions which exhibited the pieces and those which converted them into publications, as well as those which made the works and the reproductions. The entire world of art unites itself in here, untouched, behind these pieces. Even if we question ourselves if it is us who hide behind these works to peep this complex world which resides outside, inside.

This condensation effect makes itself more and more evident. This is shown by the diversity of procedence of new acquisitions, the relevance which they acquire in the context of the exhibit to the many languages to which they try to speak to, the interests and questions they make evident, and one must say, the end character of unseekable sums of its being works of art. The architectural project which is a result of the members of studio ‘Produtora no LiMac’, whose architecture one cannot see, like LiMac itself, also shows this continuously growing condensation effect.

Far from Entropy

For anyone it is evident that is not the same thing too see a work of art reproduced in some medium. A series of characteristics (which do not necessarily have to do with mechanical reproduction) make both experiences something different. Following the same ideas, one must agree (that is, if the experience does not result itself sufficient), that it is also not the same to see a work of art which reproduces the original as its reproduction. A long reflection is not necessary for one to see that there is no entropy here. What could seem to be an inevitable gradient of loss of aura results as a comeback from the experience. In these reproductions there are no entropies or loss of auras, because a new legitimacy is born in them, and when they are lost – in someway – gains reality and in some sort of way a different reality, even if connected with the original. It is a passage, a new incarnation, new music made in piece – but only in piece – from the echo of previously heard melodies.

The gesture, the brush and the hand develop reality to the object, the virtual image, but which in this moment bump into each other, to say something; their centre of gravity, so that they do not say something only about themselves anymore, or that which they initially meant, but to include also those things which they can say, the trace to the path which has taken them to be – once again – what they were, but from the emphasis of what can now, from a totally new manner, be part of LiMac. It is in this sense which LiMac, as an institutional space which assumes a critical discourse which connects itself from what seemed to been left aside, most clearly shows the concept of the artistic debt with representation, with the precise delicacy of manual work, with the sense of the artistic discourse which is created in the inside with its own space and time, in principals which are unknown to institutional means, to the criticism of discourses (if such thing was possible). An invite to another manner of comprehending the artistic experience: that of contemplation. That is, a dimension where it does not manner that which the works appropriates themselves, nor if they are resumed between brushstroke and brushstroke, because what matters is the brushstroke and the manner in which it opens one’s mind.

The museum which we cannot see drags us to its interior, makes us participants of the need for its existence and of what its lack makes us see, shows works which we shall not see and abandons us like this, contemplating them, as for making us think what is our role in all of this…

Carlo Trivelli