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Umbra

Guido Yannitto

Curator: Sofía Dourron

01.06.23 - 08.07.23

For centuries eclipses were apparently inexplicable and fearsome events, battles between the sun and evil forces or other spirits of darkness, a sign of the presence of jaguars, dogs and other celestial beasts that devour the moon and the sun and that must be defeated by gods and humans at the same time. However, since 150 BC, when Hipparchus was able to calculate that the distance between the Earth and the Moon was thirty times the Earth's diameter using only his observations of total lunar eclipses, the transits of the Moon and the Sun, and particularly their alignments, also began to produce endless amounts of knowledge and heterogeneous but coexisting experiences, both scientific and esoteric, popular and aesthetic. Since then, these astronomical phenomena illuminate the sky around the Moon and the Sun allowing us to observe new celestial bodies and make astronomical measurements and geographical, in addition to climate predictions, at the same time, read from another set of knowledge, represent significant periods of change and transformation, omens of fortune and tragedy alike.

From images that intertwine these astronomical events and their optical manifestations with the perception of shapes and color, Guido Yannitto builds his own space for pictorial exploration. There, the trajectories of the moon, the eclipses, the transformation of the materials and the different notions of time that these objects bring, are concretized in a set of works that produce an intuitive approach between various cosmic phenomena, their telluric counterparts and some expanded ideas about painting. In Eclipse, a textile of 12 meters long wound on a large spool of burnt wood, originally used for
moving and storing high voltage cables, Guido deploys the power of red, orange and yellow. As in a total lunar eclipse, when the Moon is located within the umbra—the most dark of the Earth's shadow—and the light passes through the atmosphere producing an optical phenomenon that we see from Earth as a red and bloody Moon, the color overflows the limits of perception. And the matter, the fabric, with its laborious temporality and adhered to the rhythms
circadian, flows continuously around the dense, earthy singularity of the wood burned, reminding us that there are also deep more-than-human times whose ancient energy dictates the rhythms of the planet and our own futures.


Of these processes that investigate material possibilities as an image for notions of transformation and its times, a new series of works inspired by sawdust mats emerges Mexicans used in processions dedicated to the patron saints and the dead. These works, they condense a formal intersection between technical experimentation, spiritual beliefs, popular arts and Earth sciences. The mutation of wood into sawdust in practice religious-ornamental remixes the colonial history of this tradition and intertwines it with a reinvention formal analysis of the cycles of the moon—a humanly incomprehensible time—postulating connections soft and even capricious between past, present and future. With these works, Guido recovers certain scientific and cultural phenomena as possible nodes for the connection between art, science and spirituality, knots dissolved by Western modernity, but potential tools for an aesthetic re-imagination of the present.

Sofía Dourron

Buenos Aires, June 2023

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