the exhibits “Eduardo Basualdo: Pupil” Y “Delcy Morelos: The place of the soul” complete the first stage of the annual program “A day on Earth”. Now there are eleven exhibitions that, in the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Airesquestion the public with a varied and coherent discourse.
Drawings and installations in “Pupila”, the exhibition of Eduardo Basualdo which, like so many others, also begins with a menacing dark stone. In the first drawing, the black mass seems about to split a house of equal size. Through the pupil – “small black hole that regulates the passage of light from the outside to the inside of the eye” and central figure of the drawings– the artist dives into the depths of his thought. Traced with black ink, pencil or charcoal on white paper, the drawings with black material that at times takes over the brain, shrinks, closes the pupil, multiplies, wants to be torn from the face in which it is lodged. In other instances different ghosts inhabit her mind.
The exhibition, curated by Victoria Noorthoorn and with the collaboration of Clarisa Appendino and Alejandra Aguado, follows the course of the artist’s musings during the tremendous year 2020 when the pandemic spread throughout the world. The catastrophe lurks and unfolds, as a reflection, in the almost 50 remaining small drawings displayed on walls, white, red. These guide the visitor through conduits designed to lead them to a monumental and somber installation in another room, stirring atavistic terrors from past and present.
There, the images are embodied in a kind of mud wave -constructed with sheets of matt black aluminum- that causes an unstoppable and devastating disaster.. The tangible and giant black mass it ends up crushing and covering everything in its path: people, objects, vegetation, animals. Basualdo was born in Buenos Aires in 1977, a number that, drawn upside down on a kind of white box, participates in the disturbing sound work with which he concludes his magnificent and overwhelming exhibition.
For her part, and almost as a counterpoint to Basualdo’s show, in her impressive installation “El lugar del alma”, Delcy Morelos (Colombia, 1967) invites us to look outside, to see the territory, feel the land, take care of it. Is the soul found in those blocks of earth scented with cinnamon, cloves and coffee that rise up to more than two meters high? Walking among them, perceiving their humid depth, the visitor may recognize the words of that Seattle Indian chief -who in 1885 wrote to the then president of the United States- who affirm that “(…) the earth does not belong to man; it is man who belongs to the earth.”
Image gallery
