Viviana Zargón
b. 1958 in Buenos Aires, Argentina
Viviana Zargón
b. 1958 in Buenos Aires, Argentina
ARTISTS
SEBASTIÁN CAMACHO
1982, Bogotá, Colombia
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SEBASTIÁN CAMACHO
WORK
WINDOWS OR EVERYDAY LIFE
Windows or everyday life
In the series Windows or everyday life, the artist Sebastián Camacho Ramírez proposes to recover a practice developed by countless artists of the 20th century: touring the city and understanding it as sufficient experimentation material for art. To discover in their structures and particular temporalities elements that account for the conditions of contemporary life. In the case of this series, the tours take place in the City of Buenos Aires and they found their object of study in the windows, making with them a typological review from which we can project how the city was thought and how it is being inhabited.
Architecture is a hint from which we can see how a society wants to be seen. Imaginaries of who we are, who we want to be and how we want to be seen are embodied in it. Also, it has the ability to mask its age and sometimes its referral sources. Being cultural subjects, or individuals modeled on the historical chronology of the West, gives us a framework to vaguely classify architectural forms. In a new world city like Buenos Aires, these forms respond to the echo of multiple sources of inspiration, involving a complex game in the correspondence relationship between the forms and certain specific historical moments.
In this setting, the choice of the window as an object of study also hides another intention: to recover the impulse of those who for the first time thought of painting as a transportable object, with the possibility of opening windows in a wall to see into any world. The works in this series attempt an opening in the wall that invites us to think inside these structures presented; a window that, being seen from the outside, invites us to think about who is inside.
The choice of the technique of cutout on paper, which in this case is to open holes in sheets of paper, in addition to reiterating the need for the object to be a window, allows us to approach a decomposition and reconfiguration of the reference object: it is an anarchic dissection of the daily views of the city, of its windows, where each layer carries the information of an element of the structure that, due to the way they are made, reminds us of the complexity and fragility of the spaces we inhabit.
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In this series it can be seen, as in most of Sebastian Camacho's work, subtlety and technical prowess. But in addition and above all, he proposes a display of scenes that expose his concern with representation and in particular with portraiture. Some concepts run through the series, such as melancholy and precariousness, which even include the medium of representation itself.
His interest in questioning the image and the new ways of representing (social networks, online search engines, digitality) somehow reveals his relationship with current visualities, and his way of re-constructing them through painting leads us to reflect on our own ways of linking with images.
Catches the eye in this work how its reading is renewed, appealing today to other realities than those existing at the time of its creation, adding validity and making the story more complex in relation to the pandemic: new portraits and faces that flood our contexts.
The way of doing that Camacho presents us proposes to place ourselves in the contingency of painting, to review its actuality (relationship with the here and now) as well as the ways of reinventing ourselves that often arise from new media, which in turn refer to their predecessors. Thereby, painting is historically intertwined with photography, perhaps being today one of its moments of greatest feedback.
Elisa Muñoz Elgueta
EVERYTHING I HAVE, I TAKE IT WITH ME
Everything I have I carry with me
Three notions go through the construction of the work, which, although they are presented in apparent independence, are linked and become indissoluble when I present my work.
The book. I recently read a text where someone defined the book as a succession of spaces, in which each one of them is conceived as a different moment from the one that precedes it and the one that follows it; a succession of different moments that share the same path. In this work I use the book-agenda because of the temporal notion that is implicit in it, while the agenda is an organizer of time and a support that in itself alludes to the temporal dimension of space.
Landscape. I start from a photographic image of a landscape - regularly urban - that, by the very logic of the sequence of pages in the book in which I represent it, I deconstruct in layers. So when turning the pages of the book, I seek that these layers overlap, rebuilding the initial image with this action. The landscapes from which I start to make the works are window views: seen on real occasions when I build the image by looking through the windows of the places I live in, or virtual when this image reaches me already delimited through the windows of a monitor. Thus, the landscape becomes the starting point and, in turn, the place to arrive, resignifying the image.
Trip. A book is a transportable object. And I am a traveling artist, although not all my journeys necessarily require a physical displacement. In the light of the tradition of the traveling artist, I turn to the landscape to allow a reflection on how we configure our idea of the world based on what we see through the windows, those that we permanently cross and dive in real life and in our cybernetic journeys. Everything fits in a book, in an agenda that helps us organize the trip, in an image; Well - remembering the words of Herta Müller - everything I have I carry with me.
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SEBASTIÁN CAMACHO
EXHIBITIONS
22.6.17 - 30.7.17
Incidents I - IX. Sebastian Camacho
Curator: Luciana García Belbey
In Incidences I-IX, Sebastián Camacho Ramírez presents nine of his most recent works. This grouping of drawings, paintings and openwork forms a polyphonic chorus in a spatial scenic device that unites them.
The works are supported by a repertoire of lecterns arranged in a circular way in the room. The scene allows us to go through them, to revolve around them. Each piece invites us to come closer, to lean over it in order to see in detail the complex plot that makes it up. Camacho is interested in conditioning the behavior of visitors in front of his works: he designs the staging and the display that his works will have in space. Here he proposes us to slow down our walk, forces us to stop, creates a climate prone to contemplation. It encourages us to scrutinize each stroke, each cut. Here the time is another.
Leaving clues and traces so that viewers can weave meanings and connect ideas, it leads us to think about the complexity of the little things that surround us: a feather, a dove, the urban fabric, the sea. But it also invites us to reflect on artistic practice itself. The palette, the notebook, brings us closer to the creative act, to the exercise of painting. With these works, the lonely moment of creation, the workshop space, the intimate world of the artist are revealed before our eyes.
Camacho wonders the meaning of his job in a world full of images. The delicacy and meticulousness of his works makes us think about this existential question, also about the very fragility of life and the drifts and detours that can occur in it. Returning to the title of the exhibition, an incident is an event or event that occurs (in a somewhat random way) during the development of a process and that has a relationship and influence on it. In the artist's own words "I am interested in dwelling on the momentary structure of the accidents that I use as a reference: they allow me to integrate into clear methodologies, or concrete procedures, the uncertainty of the final result and the acceptance of contingencies".
Luciana Garcia Belbey
SEBASTIÁN CAMACHO
BIO
Sebasitán Camacho (Bogotá, Colombia, 1982)
Sebastián Camacho works with oil, watercolor, cutwork on paper and graphite. He uses all these artistic resources to investigate the relationship between images and the medium that contains them. Among his main interests we can find the different stages within an artistic statement. From production to reception, Camacho finds situations that can be narrated and described, but hardly predicted. For this reason, he always chooses to work with images that can be easily assessed and do not carry big stories. Images that give room to ask ourselves what we are looking at
Sebastián has a Bachelor's degree in Fine Arts from the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá. He also undertook specialized studies in Media and Technology for Painting in the Universidad Nacional de las Artes en Buenos Aires. In 2013, he was selected to participate in the annual Program for Artists Proyecto PAC.
He featured his work in several national and international exhibitions such as: Incidencias I-IX (Galería Gachi Prieto, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2017), C A P A S (Galería El Museo, Bogotá, Colombia, 2016), Los embajadores (AMA - ArteMercadoArte, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2013) y Melgart, Arte de paseo (Museo de Arte Moderno, Bogotá, Colombia, 2013). Moreover, he participated in BIENALSUR 2017 as a member of TURN Project under the coordination of the japanese artist Katsuhiko Hibino.
He currently works as a university professor and has been part of several education departments in museums and art institutions.