2022
…What about the drowned?
—Alfredo Fressia
One more condemned to navigate under
the eternal burden of the sea on his back?“
Inés Verdugo creates an artistic universe, full of mutations, drifts, soft shapes that intermingle, melt, and self-destroy as well.
After Low Tide, her recent showing in Uruguay, Verdugo continues her journey in her country, Guatemala, extending it to this collective sample and creating a sensory space, closing cycles, and promoting an ending.
She proposes aesthetic evidence: the ship (partner in lockdown and imaginary journeys) composes through its trajectory a choreography of its own with its layers and display. We no longer see the object in the living room, we witness its presence, its final voyage through a video registry.
The artist imposes radical action, destroys the continuous and permanent presence of the ship launching it from an altitude.
The action evokes a future loss, like forceful oblivion, or might it remind us of a previous time? It proposes a ritual involving interstice, break, and ending, navigating the abyss in dry displacement, without map or compass.
It is true that the idea of creation seems to be at odds with the gesture of destruction, the action proposes the modification of a certain order, the upsetting of artistic and objectual codes in terms of what can be expected of a vessel, thus creating the imaginary of a new impossible navigation.
The liberating gesture that relegates the potential of the object into oblivion to allow for something else to happen: the destruction proposes a course of action and live experimentation, constant transformation.
A premeditated fall where its volume grows beyond its expanded field. Fragments that we fail to see but can imagine, something akin to the unreachable, where we recognize our own breaks and folds, therefore liberating us as observers from following its journey and creating new latitude without numbers; it now flows liberated.
Some objects still wait for something else to happen without moving in the living room, united by a corset that continues looking for mooring and mainland. Witnesses to a certain ending, they impose as if suppressing their strength to liberate a scream and resignedly find their place encompassing the absence of time.
In any case, both the art of destroying as well as that of waiting, are not only forms of saying ‘no’ or ‘maybe’, but they are also ways to configurate new instances of transcendence, reactivation of desire, and hope.
Lucía Pittaluga
