Oponer. Completar. Desplegar. Obras elementales de tiempo y narración. (Oppose. Complete. Unfold. Elementary works of time and narration)
Group show. Max Nissenholtz, Rose Honor, Carmen Jacobo, Kees Ouwens, Florentino Ibarra, Marco Antonio López Prado.
Juan Carlos Jiménez Abarca, curator
Centro Cultural Clavijero. Morelia, México. October 2023 – February 2024
Opening of Oponer. Completar. Desplegar. group show
October 2023
Watch it on YouTube
In his monumental work Time and Narration (1983–85), the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur set out to explore the horizons of human life as narrative and the implications this has for the writing of history, narrative fiction, and the experience of time. In those same years and with a similar sense of intention, although not at all monumental, Ramón Xirau (a Spanish poet and philosopher who had settled in Mexico since the end of the Spanish Civil War) published a short essay entitled Lived Time. About “Being” (1985). Drawing like Ricoeur on the reflections on consciousness and time contained in the Confessions of Saint Augustine, Xirau writes that it is inaccurate to speak of the past, present, and future as three separate stages of time. By focusing on the experience of life, it is more appropriate to deal with the “present time of things past and future.”
By bringing together projects and experiences in this exhibition, we aim to establish parallels and resonances between six artists of different backgrounds and temperaments. These are elementary works because they resort to different degrees of experimentation with simple and uncomplicated media: paper, ink, ceramics, wood and stone. By opposing, completing and unfolding we refer to the personal and particular process that each artist has undergone to compose each set of work, each installation, each object and image. These installations manifest hybridizations between the human and the vegetal, explorations of the forest and identity, imprints of the arboreal and the artist’s body, graphic impressions of stone matrices and the territory, ceramic narratives and animal dramaturgies.
Here there is an individual and aesthetic consideration that seeks a balance between the work produced expressly for the exhibition and the long-term series, the thematic and material explorations that each artist has carried out spontaneously, motivated by concerns other than the present exercise of exhibiting (and exhibiting themselves). These are works that manifest a rich inner life, poured into continuous trials and errors, wrapped in makings, erasures and reconstructions.
The experience of time lived, territory, memory and new ideas are motors that activate artistic production, in a specific vital coordinate that operates within these projects: the narrative will of the present about everything that has happened and what we seek in the future.
Read more at www.bancodeniebla.art