Eduardo Basualdo: “The mystery is us”

The monumental yet intimate dimension of Eduardo Basualdo 's work finds new glimpses of his poetic quality in In Medias Res , the exhibition that occupies the main gallery of Ruth Benzacar . If the oblique walls in Pupila , the Argentine artist's previous major exhibition at the Museo Moderno , incited a certain oppression, entering the dimly lit cavern of the Villa Crespo gallery can literally transport us to another place. A primitive and comfortable space.

The iconic skulls enter the repertoire with more than one mission: one of them is to recall his childhood in Mexico , where he lived in exile with his parents. Basualdo, an internationally renowned artist—he exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo, participated in the Venice Biennale and others in Korea, Havana, Porto Alegre, and Berlin, among others—who explores images of full subjectivity to transform them into visuals, is drawn to including aspects of his own biography in his work. “ There's something magical about the exhibition , of that childhood in a magical country in a dismantled moment; there's structure, realism, and at the same time something that escapes,” Basualdo said at the end of the conversation, which began like this.

-Regarding your work, you talk about translating concepts into images. Who are the people involved in In Medias Res?

The governing concepts have to do with the distance from one's own body, which is a mystery, and at the same time, we are trapped within it. In contrast to this approach that applies to science fiction and places the mystery deep within the universe, in the remote and distant, there is another interpretation of fiction and imagination: the mystery is us, it is already here, the unknown is in how the heart beats. This empty mystery is filled with hypotheses and unverifiable beliefs, instead of assuming that half of us is made up of that mystery.

What are the effects of adopting this perspective instead of trying to reach Mars?

-It's the tradition that aligns my work. But all this fanaticism focused on interplanetary exploration, like the talk of Mars in recent years, is nothing more than a distraction from the immediate issue of not polluting the ocean. Thinking about a new place for humanity to live when this planet isn't destroyed. At most, it's damaged. These are distracting approaches that don't occur to us spontaneously. Because Mars isn't in everyday life; it's in the news. It's not innocent.

How do these ideas come to life in your works? I'm thinking of the large painting of the Moon and the Earth, or the drawings that show the inside of the body .

-There was a hypothesis for a title for that image of the distance between the Earth and the Moon, which is Impossible Love, like a projection of desire that always remains at the same distance, unattainable, but within sight. With that image, I discovered that distance, which, due to a school deformity, we associate with the Moon being closer. But it's because we work on tables of this size, when they should be minuscule if they're at that distance. This deformation and the work reveal that you have to lift a veil to see . And in relation to the skeleton, I arrive at these works thinking about a gaze. It's important what gaze each exhibition proposes. In Pupila , there was an introjected gaze into the interior of the skull and into memory; and now there's a much broader gaze, it's an X-ray gaze . What can you see with this filter? What is the material that is holding us up, like in the bones?

It's very difficult for us to accept that the skull is there. Out of practical necessity, I began studying bones, and now it's impossible for me not to feel them when I touch my arm. We've seen them endlessly in art history, we see them iconically throughout Western tradition, and they're here. It's also a mystery.

-From your previous show, there's the drawing and this strange material you adopted to speak. What's that continuity like?

- Graciela Speranza told me that she would present my work to her students by saying, "Well, this artist invented this material." In art, that's a lot. And it continues to give me a lot, like landscape dimensions, mineral dimensions. The opportunity to talk about a piece of land on a scale much larger than that of the body itself, almost larger than the room itself, because it's understood that it could continue. To put a piece of infinite, immeasurable scale into a measurable place, like an exhibition hall.

That metaphor interests me because it's very similar to our mind, which is a space of immeasurable dimensions confined to a specific place, which is this (pointing to his head). The novelty is that I show the reverse of this material with two qualitatively different sides, which have different sensations and generate different atmospheres. And in relation to the drawing, the continuity is with the matte black chalk pastel. What changed was the scale. Although there are elements of fiction, it has to do with realism, X-rays, and facing the mirror.

-On the other hand, other materials are added, such as colored wax, which is used to make human silhouettes that float in space.

-They are waxed fabrics that in the exhibition take the place of a sheath, of shedding the sheath of losing that first garment that is human skin, torn, but also warm, skins. They remind me of the Ona tents , as places of protection, small refuges in the face of hostility.

-I was thinking about that idea of refuge with the cave, a space of intimacy, at the extreme of helplessness caused by enormous distances.

-For me, yes. There's a gesture that all the creations we humans invent refer to things we already have in our bodies, like the clamp, the hammer. And one of the tools that interests me in art is being able to take you to another place, and at high speed. A drastic change of situation. It's a gesture that emulates what we can do with just our minds, which is to close our eyes and think about another place.

-It is an artistic operation, but a human one, beyond the threat of technology.

I heard a journalist say he's fascinated by Messi because he's a human who can do that. They can build a robot that plays like that, but the challenge is that a human can do it, someone like you, from your neighborhood, who lived your story. That moves us. There's no competition there, because we're not talking about absolutes but about subjective things.

If the product were equal or better, if you could really use AI to calibrate to our mood and do something better, I'd have that disenchantment. Because it's a game between us, not about how many goals can be scored per second. Let the machines compete . There will be an artificial intelligence biennial, but there will also be another one for human beings. We're talking about games, because you could also kiss a robot. You can marry a robot, but the magic is finding a person.