The rest is cinders 

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Carolina Favre, Faktor and Julián Astelarra 

 

You, who presume to understand the eternity you imagine,

 learn from these ruins, if not how to live, then how to fall.

- Francisco de Quevedo

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If we consider the possibility that all historical times coexist in the same space, we can speak of a fusion between the properties of form and materials, transcending and traversing different eras simultaneously. Contemporary artists thus become guides, carrying these spare elements until full units are formed, in an act of accompaniment and cooperation that often precedes the production itself. In this universe, artistic practice is revealed as an active immersion in what is given, a dialogue with the presences that already inhabit the medium.

Graham Harman states that humans are distinguished primarily from inanimate objects by their condition as “sensual objects,” but how then can we approach the works of Carolina Favre, with her curves that mimic the very folds of the body, with the soft pink tint of applied blush? The artist Katja Novitskova calls this process morphogenesis: the birth of form, the key to blurring the boundaries between objects and subjects. Favre assists this birth, enabling it but also allowing it to simply be. By "applying makeup" to cement as if it were a friend's face, she experiments with a way of softening it and, therefore, making it human. Tracing its cavities and protuberances with her fingers, highlighting certain areas with bright colors, becomes a game of translating one anatomy (human) to another.

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Julián Astelarra employs similar operations in his multiple frescoes. Traditionally, this technique allows the paint to become an integral part of its location, making the pigment and the wall inseparable. In this case, we find ourselves with peeling and partially hidden images on the verge of rupture. A burlesque poetry of ruins. He rescues them, frames them with delicate aluminum borders, and allows them to be transportable and interchangeable, giving the fresco the possibility of existing in a place outside the wall, even in something as ephemeral as a fruit. If the three birds from the myth of Zeuxis were to perch in front of Astelarra's apples, the first would be startled; the second would try to peck at the painted fruit; the third would remain still, staring intently.

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Faktor's works place us in a quasi-telluric imaginary by constructing organic forms that exhibit the kind of behaviors generally belonging to the realm of technology. These mutant creatures, with sharp and shining quills, hypnotize us with images and lights projected from a fragmented reality. A reality that admits Yuk Hui's multiple cosmotechnics, which discards a single technology as a universal starting point and warns of different ways of feeling and ordering experience. In his work, this diversity is evident through a detailed material experimentation. Plugs modeled in cold porcelain, precisely sharpened screws, the sequential programming of holograms that appear and disappear in a choreography rehearsed a thousand times. This makes Faktor a ceramist, a blacksmith, and a programmer, all at once.

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In a way, this common ground allows us to imagine a universal history based on cement, fresco, and hologram. What is this art contemporary to? In an odyssey of material interrogation, the three artists embark on operations and processes of extreme delicacy: they become experts in minuscule languages, in precise idioms. They are ambitious polyglots who break down the layers and codes of each material dialect and traverse hybrid and polarizing paths between the organic and the cybernetic, the rigid and the erotic, the permanent and the ephemeral. 

 

Carolina Repetto

2025