This exhibition is part of the research group “Passage-Unfolding: the dismemberment of Actaeon,” and it aims to delve into the notion of the pictorial as a living and thinking matter. In other words, it seeks to establish a reflective and plastic exchange on the possibilities of approaching a manifestation of painting as an unstable surface from which the materiality of things can resist and emerge in its dual condition: as a concrete object and as the overflowing energy of the sign of existence. The pictorial, then, becomes embodied, palpable as a mutating body that expresses itself through detail, void, stain, and what is layered, helping to expand its singularity into other mediums like installation, sculpture, and photography.

The pictorial serves as a catalyst to encourage the artists involved in this project to think about the creative process entangled in the folds of a materiality that defines itself as multiple and inexhaustible, demanding speculation on the artistic gesture from one’s own practice, in communion with a perception of reality that aspires to surpass the rational human thought and instead install what Walter Benjamin called Unmensch, that is, the inhuman, the monstrous—a scenario where the perspective of the human being is dismembered to be recomposed as excess, indeterminacy, and potency. Painting is an unstable surface where existence is installed as an assemblage of diverse perceptions and objects, defining it as a material surface that harbors diverse and delirious semantic layers. A dynamic and uncertain sphere where the notion of delay in Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés can also be identified, along with its indecisive dialogue with the original condition of the world that Gilles Deleuze uncovers in the cinematic work of Erich von Stroheim, mixing the different behaviors of Duchampian postponement and Stroheim’s destructive force. A process that, in its deferral and dilation, produces a formal friction: seeing is mediated by an obstacle. Here, the figure of Actaeon is key as an entity that looks, only to be overwhelmed by the gaze of another who dismantles him, incorporating him into a scene of the impossible.

(…) agential contributions of non-human forces (operating in nature, the human body, and human artifacts) in an attempt to counteract the narcissistic reflection of human language and thought. (…) The power-thing accounts for the strange capacity that ordinary human-made objects have to exceed their status as objects and to manifest traits of independence or vitality, thus forming the outside of our own experience. —Jane Bennet

The artwork as a method from which the figure is decomposed to reconfigure it based on the objects that traverse our vital field, demanding our attention, bursting and dazzling the space that seemed so familiar and that, through the force of formal/conceptual inquiry, is displaced, invading the frame with its fragmentary force, with its violent, nebulous inadequacies.

– Jorge Aycart Larrea