WHAT CANNOT BE DIVIDED

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Sabrina Merayo Nuñez

 

Conversing with Sabrina and touring her workspace—that watchmaker's desk of nature she set up in Escobar before bringing everything to the gallery—I realized that, thankfully, curiosity still exists. This means art still exists. Thus, in every dimension of daily life, in every facet of what there is, there is art. The art of changing the subject, the art of arguing, the art of living, the art of taking taxis, the art of serving lunch, the art of loving, the art of applauding... and the art of science. Science, unlike art, operates with protocols, formalized methodologies, unbreakable jargon, paradigms to start from to arrive who knows where, precision tools, and procedures guided by a path with steps, destinations, and conclusions that are nourished by past conclusions to yield that strange word: progress. In art, there is no progress, primarily because it always has one foot outside this concatenation of characteristics I just named. Art is there to break the house of cards of civilizational naivety; everything else is system, industry, normalized reproduction of alienated life. But can there be an art inspired by science? Of course, that attitude is at least Renaissance-like. And can there be a science stimulated by the temptations of art? Of course, without unruly purposes, there would be no discoveries; there's an artist's daring in every scientist, an artistic impulse to know.

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In Sabrina's works, these magnetic and conflicting relationships between art and science have always been evident. Trees, woods, mechanisms, functionalities, gratuitous forms, fungi, weeds, secrets tucked away in micro-parts of micro-parts, and an exemplary insistence on what lies behind what is seen. She investigates the ways nature can be transformed into something else. Data, object, and artwork are aspects of saying the same thing as we navigate this exhibition, which is explored by conversing with light and space. I recall now that Adorno quoted a phrase from Goethe, to explain that truth only shines for a moment, flashes and then leaves: "condemned to see the illuminated, not the light." It's as if art prepares the ground for a truth that it itself proves we don't know where it comes from or where it goes.

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Sabrina always has overlapping concerns, like a psychedelic chorus of occurrences composed of many tiny voices that come both from the deepest part of the inexplicable natural ancestor in all living things, and from the most aseptic spirits of the sophisticated language of biology, chemistry, or botany. She knows that deep down, things cannot be divided, but it's not that she believes in totality. Rather, she works with the symphony of parts, with circuits and functions. Like a structuralist, she decomposes to narrate and narrates to know. Sabrina works in a theater in the city where she lives, which is not Buenos Aires. She does makeup, makes masks, prosthetics, and relevant elements for the transformation of characters or so they can say something else with their faces. "Something else" means demonstrating their concurrent aspects, as in Cubism. What lurks, as in cities. The totality of faces of an identity that is, in turn, broken by the gaze of others. This perpetually troubled, not entirely definable identity is also a product of the art of psychoanalysis, which came from the art of tragedy, which in turn came from theater itself (from the depths of art). She should also be placed in conversation with three other contemporary Argentine artists, Marcela Sinclair, Jime Croceri, and Eugenia Calvo, to see what they have in common and what exercise in triangulation of intentions they teach us.

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This exhibition is a very particular staging, where dimmers, earth, and DNA entangle us in an origin that we neither know nor ever will. Sabrina seems to say that the world to which science and art adhere is a mess and always has been. That data and the manipulation of data are a conversation that powers have all the time and that we never fully hear. She knows and tells us that we can grasp something from the elements of those conversations to understand what cannot be divided, which seems to be the origin, the nature of things; which includes, of course, art. Thus, as a provisional bow, we can recall a hilarious phrase from the ever-quoted Foucault, which both serves and does not serve to continue, but which certainly serves art. Not to laugh with art but to free ourselves from those who, by dint of insistence, end up protocolizing it. Once, speaking of origin, Foucault summarized everything by saying that at the origin there is disparate. There are two things: disparity, irresolution. Just thinking about it brings peace and curiosity.

 

Curatorial Text: Juan Laxagueborde

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