MARÍA ELISA LUNA
1976, Buenos Aires, Argentina

A passage to the abstraction of the senses.  

Conformations: Sabrina Merayo Nuñez´s exhibition in Gachi Prieto Contemporary Art.  

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Knowledge is locked with them

not by representation

but by affective pollution

Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis
 
Sabrina Merayo Nuñez borrows from the stage and the laboratory the particular ways that her objects exhibit. We see the minimum required number of parts to establish a hypothesis of the human gesture that intersects matter. The pieces are strong enough to stand on their own and the imprint of work done on them appears as a single argument. Isolated and reunited, the pieces are distributed in the space surrounded by silence, this being the best appearance of meaning. The presentation of forces is replicated from the theatre stage (like in the encounter of the protagonist and the agonist in it or like in the projection of the actor's voice to his audience), the difference lying in that here the bodies are materials in a concrete state rather than figurative and what we see are brief scenes frozen in time: resistances of the material, mutations to which they were subjected, processes suspended halfway to becoming something else; ultimately tests and displacements. From the lab, not only we recognize the way in which the object is approached and analyzed in its parts, we can, above all, recognize that each piece is a sample obtained at the artist´s workshop between tools and books, between objects to disarm and works to be finished.

By using its own collection of materials from the world of furniture, Merayo Nuñez makes a type of inventory that associates the artistic gesture with a philosophical perspective in the particular context of the gallery´s white cube; she focuses on operations that were used to change the matter before the norm was the industrialization of the object. Here the artist acts as a collector and alchemist: she removes objects from their source of origin and inserts them into that space to appear seemingly neutral like the museum aesthetic that adds aesthetic value and an appropriate distance from the utilitarian world. In this territory of the poetic the viewer is invited to read each form with tactile eyes, to walk to the meeting of materials given in the pieces and to pay attention to the tensions, to that which gives and which vibrates in those abstract relations. These conformations can be read as haiku, for their brevity and for evoking an instant.  Their reading is primarily a passage to the abstraction of the senses.

The artist displays a collection of works that account for the relationship between humans, ideas and the objects present in the dramas of our own history read through the furniture and the ornament. There is a universal force in the practice of Merayo Nuñez, applicable to the metaphor of the machine: the exposure of its parts, their relationships and the notion of their limits before the whole set that may appear opaque to the user; this to make visible what usually appears invisible. What is the syntax of an object? How many ways are there to combine and arrange a set of materials? What happens when those same materials, forced by the power of the work applied to that matter, are directed towards new states? These are some of the questions that might have guided the work done in Conformations. It is fair to say that there is research on how objects and materials are given different roles and meanings over time and different cultures until they reach our present; in this case, the artist dismantles and rearranges them to be able to find other powers in those relationships. Small powers, brief meeting instants that divert the natural course of our relationship with them and propose a way of being in the world differently or at least, more awaken, more alert.

 

Mariana Rodriguez Iglesias
Nuñez, Spring 2016

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