THE ENIGMA OF TIME 

An incursion into a multiverse-framework of artistic practices signals a possibility of a deeper comprehension of the actual state of art. The artists that La Balsa presents for Art Paris Art Fair reflect the state of artistic practice in Colombia.  

We propose three artists: Julian Burgos, Juan Osorno, and Luis Fernando Peláez.  

Together they represent spheres of high energy. Characterized by continuous production, they create new facets of work, while always questioning their own results and ‘starting over’. 

For Burgos, the time-line of reference is painting in the French classical technique. Yet this passion for the voluptuous forms and colors of the XVII century is overturned with the overlaying of digital compositions that further exacerbate and break apart all classical unity. Beyond the bold spatial turns of mannerism or baroque painting, in his work, the ‘arrow’ of time springs forward in an unending bending of the rules, flashback and fast-forward. 

What if the work of Humboldt had taken a different turn? This is the question for Juan Osorno, whose exploration of improbable accidents in nature is a way of referring to a moment in history where the search for knowledge was based on the documentation of the real. But nightmares are also real, as real as the production in the timeline of strange new phenomena. In the new series of drawings “Humboldt’s treaty”, the extreme perfectionism of drawing technique goes hand in hand with a nod to the probability of chaos in un-linear evolution. 

Subjacent in the work of Luis Fernando Peláez is the notion of memory. Rooted in understanding the nature of basic human bonding, the piece of luggage or a found photograph represent the traces of the need to return, or maybe a longing for the end of the journey home. Here, time is really an enigma, as we live the present through the past. 

Central to our frame of ideas is the question of the representation of time in art and its conceptual understanding; its meaning and function of symmetry-asymmetry (before/after) and how time works as a representation of a state of disorder, in search of lessening entropy. Paraphrasing Laura Mersini-Houghton, in “Notes on Time’s Enigma”, we can say that the fundamental question of time in their proposals is distinct from the ‘local time’ in the nucleating bubble universes of transitional contemporary practice. As the author notes, “only the highly ordered, high energy (low entropy) states are the most probable universes”. This represents for us the ‘survival universes’ of these artists, who, with their energy and constant questioning of ideas, tread relevant artistic worlds which curiously sidestep the immediate novelty of the contemporary, to address the lingering question of what art and time represent. 

Ana Patricia Gómez - Director