The exhibition, open to the public from May 6 to 17 in
The exhibition, open to the public from May 6 to 17 in
Retina, as the ‘place where the image is recorded,’ is etymologically related to a spider's web, a fine structure whose function is to envelop, cover and adapt to the shape of something it seeks to protect. Likewise, rutina (routine), as the ‘well-worn path,’ is approached through its relationship with the term ruptura (rupture), with the idea of breaking and opening paths, like a crack that marked something in the past, whose present becomes habit, paths walked by generations.
This process of differentially bringing together the terms used led to a reflection on ceramics, especially pre-Hispanic Andean plates, those of ancient Greece and those of many other cultures, where the techniques used by these civilizations reveal links between them, leading one to conclude that there was never any real distance between them, but rather closeness, synchronous shortcuts across times and spaces beyond the dimension that today's human, the city dweller, may perhaps never come to understand.
Thus, imagining a ceramic plate beyond its conventional image, as having once been an object of everyday or funerary use, R(E)(U)TINA presents these aesthetic artifacts as image-capturing devices, as ocular organs, circular networks that, through refraction or reflection, record that routine, experience or everyday life in the city onto the retina of these plates, and perhaps onto the retinas of those who would come to be its viewers.
This proposal invites reflection on a material so noble to work with and yet so important to human time and memory: clay, ceramics, terracotta, the material used by the gods for the creation of life, of myth, of origin.
Juan Jiménez G.
Master in Visual Arts