Art as an opportunity
ESTE ARTE
El Observador, December, 30th 2024

Each work of art weaves a dialogue and a network of relationships with a set of other works, with history, with the context, with the local, the regional and the international.

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Yes, we can approach art as an opportunity. We can begin this new year with an active and questioning gaze, where we allow ourselves to be guided by curiosity and intuition in an unprejudiced way. I'm interested in thinking of art as power, as openness, as that which is yet to be discovered, the unknown, the dormant. That which has not yet developed, that which is yet to come.

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At some point we can think of art as a journey of learning and knowledge towards other cultures and realities. But it is a journey in two dimensions: the spatial and the temporal. Art not only allows us to know or imagine new possible landscapes, but it also allows us to speculate about other times, whether in the past or in the future. And I say speculate because art does not seek to seal great truths, but precisely likes to play on the limits of what is possible, what is imaginable, what is comprehensible...

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In the same way, we can think of art as a journey into our interiority, our inner world, a journey that instead of moving us outwards helps us to connect with ourselves. Art can be an invitation to reflection and introspection, an invitation to review and rethink ourselves. Art often unsettles us, provokes us, questions us. It seeks to question some of our most immovable beliefs and ideas so that others can emerge.

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There is an experience-based quality in art, which is very difficult to reproduce. We are presented with a situation or a proposal to be experienced and perceived by our senses and intellect. There is an intellectual dimension to the appreciation of art, because it is from knowledge and understanding that we delve into its depths. These are tools and ways of access that help us in its unravelling, in that which is so characteristic of art that has to do with the ineffable. Art has a certain substance that is very difficult to grasp or put into words. It is complex to try to break down why we are more attracted to one piece than another, we use different resources to do so, but the closer we get and the more effort we put in, the more we realise that it is incomprehensible in its complexity. And that is precisely its power: its capacity to continue creating or emanating meanings.

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Each work of art weaves a dialogue and a network of relationships with a set of other works, with history, with the context, with the local, the regional and the international. The works do not emerge in isolation, but connect, add to and enhance the complexity of an argumentative development, which continues in suspensive points awaiting a new activation... In this way, art has the capacity to generate a relational framework, to weave links that bring us back to the community and, in some cases, take us out of our self-absorption and alienation.

 

In Uruguay, an art fair like ESTE ARTE, an international fair, functions as a portal that connects us and positions the country and its artists in the international art scene without losing the quiet pace and the taste of sand and salt. It is a space for dialogue to enter into conversation with regional and international art through the participation of galleries and local and foreign referents that allow us to delve into the work of various artists from different perspectives.

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In short, art is an opportunity to reinvent ourselves from the personal to the communal in a weft where the possible and the imaginable converge.