CONVERTIR UNA PALABRA EN SOMBRA

The exhibition Convertir una palabra en sombra presents a series of works from different years of production under the concept of shadow, light and time as working materials. Drawings, installations and sculptures projected in space are presented as a monochrome and sensorially dynamic spatial text that question the literalness of forms and conventional uses of light. While Western culture tends to emphasize light as a symbol of truth and revelation, Eastern culture celebrates shadow and emptiness as essential elements of beauty and wisdom. This exhibition is positioned at the hinge of both cultures, in a sort of duality, the works seek the complexity of space, knowledge and depth of thought, placing the viewer in a space of reflection.

“It cannot be about how much we know, we must think about what we have to discover. I believe that all experience vibrates in the unknown and our only certainty is the irremediable new happening of things,” says the artist. Paths, to travel another possible time, a shadow capable of being inhabited. About this in the Orient in 1933, Tanizaki writes: “the reflections are not made to be seen in full light, but must be guessed in the half-light like mysterious rays, agitated by time. Inviting those who inhabit the space of the imagination to disconnect certainty to enter the realm of reverie”.

In the West, 36 years later Jorge Luis Borges, almost 70 years old and with advanced blindness, published a collection of poems entitled Elogio de la sombra, which points to the inability to see as a return to the origin, to the confused blindness of the first beams of light, the cyclical return of life where it seems that reason dwells in the shadow. “I reach my center, my algebra and my key, my mirror. Soon I will know who I am” concludes Jorge Luis Borges in Elogio de la sombra 1967-1969.

Convertir una palabra en sombra is the third solo exhibition of the Chilean artist Benjamín Ossa, after 10 years of working with the gallery, the artist presents a large exhibition on both levels of the new gallery located at 675 Paraguay Street.