This post is also available in: Spanish
Childhood returns in the work of Catalina Schliebener and Jorge Opazo. Schliebener’s previous exhibit at Bisagra, Cuentos para la infancia y el hogar (Schliebener, Bisagra, 2010), borrowing the Grimm Brothers’ Household Tales title in Spanish, revolved around the family and its artificially sweetened representations in pedagogical culture. Her work suggested that monsters and ghosts would inevitably return to haunt and stalk us because the real always tends to come back when trauma is erased, and not overcome.
Catalina Schliebener, Collages, Installation View
On this occasion, Schliebener and Opazo have joined up to exhibit their own respective works, displayed in the same space to produce a mutual dialogue. Quoting William Burroughs, Máquina Blanda, (Soft Machine) trespasses the walls of the home and the trees of the forest to dive directly into underwater and spatial fantasies. They leave gravity and oxygen aside to devote themselves to a terrain where fiction and speculation are claimed with the calmness and serenity of ancestral truth.
Catalina Schliebener, Photomontages and Sculptures, Installation View
In Schliebener’s collages, dislocated, cut-out characters from children’s stories mix with vegetal structures of hallucinogenic geometries and stale colors. Faceless and as if unwittingly entertained by some obscure detail, they float on a plain and dark background that seems to extend endlessly. The reality of weight and oxygen manifests in the shapes of painted spots, sometimes transparent and subtle, but always glossy and formless. The eye finds them, surprised: There! In her representation of domestic space, the plants live in their respective pots, but they don’t belong in the plant kingdom any more.
Jorge Opazo, Installation View
In Opazo’s work, the bodies of the characters have disappeared under their heavy astronaut paraphernalia; they’ve turned into a machine that dreams of an easily accessible natural world. Their stories rest on thick, weighty and disproportionate concrete bases. The scissors have rid the books of their titles to let the images on their covers transport us to unknown universes. Unpainted and grey, the bases contrast with and keep the pulps standing and closed, turning them into a delirium of pure observation.
Jorge Opazo, Installation View
Distanced both from knowledge and fiction, Schliebener and Opazo’s work dives into worthless and naïf literature, marked by fantasy-science and cheap printing. This includes not only the world of comics and surprising, insignificant discoveries, but also fear and freedom, suffocation and endless space, inexplicable realities beyond logic and proportion.
Jorge Opazo, Installation View
Burroughs’ soft machine consists of the human body itself, with its flesh and weaknesses, and its endless capability, sometimes paranoid, of re-reading, remixing and thus producing new texts and new images. It happens “precisely in the middle of reality and our dreams,” say Catalina and Jorge, cutting and pasting, following the directions of the cut-up method employed during the writing of The Soft Machine and Naked Lunch. That’s how mutations happen, slowly, but implacably, as if the brain of Opazo’s astronauts had become one of those monstrous flowers that float outside the body in Schliebener’s collages.
Catalina Schliebener, Collages, Detail
Catalina Schliebener and Jorge Opazo,
Máquina Blanda (Soft Machine)
Through August 13th
Jardín Oculto Galería
Venezuela 926, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Tuesday – Saturday, 1 – 7 PM
