Processes and the life of things

La Balsa Arte seeks to explore the relationship between visual proposals in art and the nature of diverse entities that, as the foundation of all reality, are immersed in continuous processes of transformation. In the work of Jorge Barco and Astrid González, the focus on sensory experience, achieved through sound and video, is associated with the changing states of the observed, whether of states of matter or animistic relationships between man and nature. On the other hand, contemplation, historical evocation and irony are games of meaning distinctive of the work of Julián Burgos, Radenko Milak and Martha Lucía Ramírez ranging from figurative moments of art (Burgos) to the radical transformation of the inhabited urban environment with its consequent signaling of the state of the contemporary world, and the transformation of the written word in Ramírez's collage works.

Jorge Barco's sculptural assemblages make use of low technologies devised by the artist to capture the sounds of the earth, from the 'bodies of water' (a name that is in itself a nod to animism) or those produced by meteorites, rocks and other elements. In his words, with the 'homemade' devices, with “thousands of coils and many tiny pieces is the conviction to listen to the earth, the rock, the water, the other..., the non-human as something urgent in a collapsing planet; listening as an empathetic gesture.”1

Astrid González elaborates in her works historical moments of the journey of Afro-American communities in Latin America, from Brazil, Chile, and Colombia to the Dominican Republic. In her videos she deals, among others, with the theme of healing through words, dialogue with plants, spirituality and communion with nature. Animism, a practice that attributes different animic qualities and perceptions to non-human entities, is close to the thinking of A.N. Whitehead's pragmatic process philosophy, which identifies notions such as nexus, extensive continuum, feeling, potential as continuity, and the body as witness.

Burgos carefully scrutinizes the formation of artistic languages from his interest in baroque painting emerging from the Counter-Reformation. Baroque, for him, is the possibility of accelerating time, projecting stylistic freedom to combine past, present and future.

Martha Lucía Ramírez develops a series of works based on homework notebooks found in second-hand bookstores in Madrid, referring to the written word. Through drawing, painting and stitching, the school 'exercise books' are transformed into new entities that allude to childhood, to the slow passage of time. Like other artists, including Basquiat, these scraps of annotations are a metaphor for oblivion. His dissolved words create new mosaics of ambiguous meaning, where the fragment takes preponderance, letting ideas flow randomly. The experience of a slow, anonymous and aleatory past time is an indirect question about the meaning of history.

The city as a human construction, the artificiality of the constructed landscape and our distance from a natural world are concerns that emerge from Radenko Milak's work. In a process that has included several series of watercolors on cinema, the history of the twentieth and twenty-first century, from the pandemic the artist works the idea of the individual in society (the series 'Neighbors') and the particular physiognomy that cities take from the processes of modernization, war, growth and socio-cultural characteristics.

Between the human and the non-human, these five artists generate a concern about the states of consciousness, the passage of time and particularly, about the vital processes of nature and society in which we are immersed.

Ana Patricia Gómez - Director

[1] Text by the artist published on Facebook.