"Mutant Matters" - Casa Matienzo

Maria Emilia Marroquin, Rita Simoni and Ariela Naftal

Quote from the text by Eugenia Garay Basualdo - Curator

 

... "The action of mutating refers to the change that usually occurs in some living organism. This is not the case. The materialities gathered in these rooms are almost all inorganic. But the trigger that initiated the productive processes of these artists was the mutation. About how they explored the possibilities that the elements they work with have, to urge them to change. Going back to the mutation action that can be observed under a microscope by a scientist who examines an organism in a lab, it may be more convenient to explain the complex road that promoted the use of the term mutant for this exhibition. The materials that are exposed have been forced to mutate since they are unable to do so alone; or they are intentionally transformed or the passage of time, the weather, or some other external factor takes care of it. On this occasion, the architects of the mutations were their loyal work elements and they proposed to install and intervene the space with them, but highlighting the transformation process they wanted to provoke in each one.

 

All three possess constructive attitudes and used them. All three know deeply their materials and coerced them. The gesture of forcing each of them is visible. But also each one incorporated their sensibilities about the materialities. This is how they were determined to find new shapes, colors, textures and expressivities.

 

Ariela Naftal, in her facet as a ceramist and sculptor, takes that main material that is the plaster to remove it from its already expended tradition of being used as a mold and turn it into a work of art, as she also collects blisters of all kinds to tear off their appearances, and with an archaeological procedure of filling the gaps equal to the one carried out at the ruins of Pompeii, she makes visible what is no longer there. These sculptural objects seen together resemble fragments of some kind of Russian Constructivism city, those designed by Rodchenko and Tatlin. Let´s consider them as white, impeccable ruins that were never inhabited, without traces but with remains of plaster dust, once part of others that no longer exist. Something happened, whether it was a cataclysm or the mere action of mass consumption that makes that everything that was once thought and built to last forever, at some point was discarded by something else. And so we fill ourselves with useless objects, and many times we have to keep living with them.

 

The "mutant matters" are those that we all have at hand and that we transform with or without intention. An intense desire to transform prevailed here but also to disturb and allow what is shown to continue its mutation in the eyes of each visitor. "...