Cuántico Espiritual
Mauro Giaconi
26 March > 22 May 2022
Bendana | Pinel Art Contemporain is pleased to present Mauro Giaconi's second solo exhibition “Cuántico Espiritual [Spiritual Quantum]” at the gallery.
Giaconi's work starts from explorations on the formal, historical and cultural characteristics and particularities of everyday objects and images, focusing on the materiality of these elements to transform it and provoke situations where illusion transforms the perception of our context, to propose reflections on our social, cultural and political environments. Giaconi's work is framed in various concepts of precariousness, understood from the fragility of the environment as well as from the economy of the materials he uses, being these, for the most part, ordinary and/or discarded materials.
On the one hand, the gallery walls display a series of drawings made on the encyclopedia called "The new treasure of youth" – an encyclopedia published in the seventies that today is sold by the kilo for scenery or to decorate libraries. These constitute a series of compositions that arise from the decomposition of the visual content of the encyclopedia, disordering the information to explore new orders, not only of the images, but also of their symbologies. Intervening and connecting the printed images through mimetic drawings made with pigments, graphite, charcoal and eraser, Giaconi extends the forms and textures of the images of the publication, overflowing the images and infecting one with another, proposing new possible narratives, reconfiguring the hegemonic universal historical information, modifying the "past" to invoke new possible futures.
On the other hand, in the center of the room there is an installation that interferes in the transit of the space and is titled "There will be a disorder", a phrase quoted from the book "La Conquête du Pain", by Piotr Kropotkin, published in Paris in 1892, which refers to the disorders in everyday life that must be accepted as a result of social revolutions. An accumulation of boxes, piled up, a sort of warehouse where each container is occupied by a series of objects – mainly construction and kitchen tools, as well as urban waste. These are inhabited by a population of mushrooms, mushrooms that are not, that appear to be, mushrooms that are made with food that grow beneath the ground, with tubers – potatoes, sweet potato, carrot, radish, beet, ginger, jicama, etc. – carved and dehydrated forming small edible sculptures created with the opposite process to the natural habitat of fungi. That is, darkness and humidity vs. dryness and sunlight. These break down the perception of what is seen, manipulating the concessions of what the eye is used to seeing, proposing, through this small dislocation, to create distrust about what surrounds us, about what is established as "truth".
As in Schrödinger's cat, where the cat is alive and dead at the same time, in Cuántico Espiritual things propose to be and not to be at the same time, provoking small dislocations in the environment that surrounds us, small visual illusions that transform and decompose reality and that are presented within an apocalyptic imaginary, invoking the vital power of putrefaction.
