Sergio Verastegui - Dead Eyes Opened

 

EXCEPTIONAL CLOSURE FROM THE 21ST TO THE 29TH OF JUNE.

THE EXHIBITION WILL OPEN AGAIN FROM THE 30TH OF jUNE TO THE 2ND OF JULY INCLUDED.

WE REMAIN AVAILABLE BY APPOINTMENT.

 

The history of the exhibition space insisted on the idea to "isolate" the elements within it. The white clinic space that, in the second half of the XXth century until now, is developing a dimension in which the elements can be separated from the rest of the world, in which the objects will be reduce to a degree zero where everything is in a new potential dimension. A potential that can reinterpretate and revitalize all sets of different things. With the fall of the frame and the transformation of the nineteenth century “salon” in “white cube” everything becomes a potential art object. Objects found traces of narrative paths where the missing parts suggest its entire size. Fragments that are looking for the rest are in a state of dynamic tension.
This dialogue between and around the fragment is clearly to find in the work of Sergio Verastegui where elements undergo processes in which its shape is derived from a fragmentation of the original. In a certain way the artist respond to this process of “isolation” to show the invisible parts like the rest of the fragment of the whole process to arrive at that particular moment.
The fragment transport with him a sense of time and are emanating a sense of the entire, but also the whole process that was bringing them there: a history. The sentence “A space within a space within a space” is referring to this process to generate different dimensions. The form of translation that the artist is doing in order to transform the space in history and connect a singel object, a fragment, to a different space and time dimension.
Space as the process to find and give a history are elements that are particular important for the work of Sergio, but especially the connection that all these elements can have with a strong use of language. The translation that is constantly used by the artist is a base for the language and his potentials.
In his works are constantly show the relationship between the elements and the space between the objects their processes that generated their forms. Everything seems to be in a sort of archive-shaped. Nothing is derived from a pure coincidence, but by a clear sequence of elements that generate new forms. In the works of Verastegui it seems to be essential that an object has a story, its path and its own specific memory.
The exhibition space is for Verastegui the place where an object can be enriched with additional elements. The exhibition not only a visual device but a place that manages to reactivate elements that would otherwise be invisible or destined to disappear.
Layers are physically as metaphorically making overlapping, showing a whole grammar of possibilities to see and to hyde elements. In the work of Verastegui this dynamic is evident.
A talisman, an object that has a long history, is part of this cartography of displacements. What happens in the exhibition of Sergio Verastegui is that there is a feeling to be somewhere else, in a place that is not really the exhibition space in which the show has place. We could be in a series of spaces generate by the nature of the works that are in the show, their way to be and to be shown.
The sculptural condition in which the objects are posed and the powerless way how the canvas are hanging demonstrate this opens in the oeuvre of Verastegui in which behind the elements are hidden a source of endless histories.

Lorenzo Benedetti, 2016