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Superficies de Revolución

Superficies de Revolución

Curated by Verónica Guerrero

Exhibition

-> May 11 2023 – Jul 31 2023

Galería Karen Huber

today open 11:00AM 7:00PM

Karen Huber Gallery presents the collective exhibition Superficies de Revolución that brings together the work of the artists: Alejandro García Contreras, Allan Villavicencio, Ernesto Solana, Lucía Vidales, Merike Estna and Jeanie Riddle.

At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.”
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on.”
“You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!” (1)

Painting has served as Buckingham’s theorem (2) for those who want to reduce some dimensions to others. Plastic in its bowels, it has warped the three-dimensionality of the human gaze in an optical game, one that extends throughout history without being considered finished.

From Altamira (3) to Santa Maria Novella (4), passing through the Hospicio Cabañas (5), the pictorial is a dimensional analysis that reverts to trompe l’oeil. Not with a basis in ill-fated deception, but rather in the genuine exercise of whoever desires the analysis of what surrounds them.

At some point in childhood my father told me the Hawking anecdote, and as a result the image of the universe as an infinite tower of tortoise shells (6) never disappeared from my catalog of attractive and happy memories.

With hope discarded of locating the noumenon (7), the result does not bring us any closer to the truth. As in scientific practice, the pictorial endeavor is an exercise of analysis in which form swallows content, just as it is process that comes about as the revealer.

In Philosophy of Science I embraced instrumentalism (8) because I recalled that lady and her turtles. The curating here presented is an instrument that, based on intuition, constructs what I would like to regard as a prediction:

That the universe is an infinite tower of turtles, and that the pictorial does not have just a single surface, but every possible surface (9).

Verónica Guerrero, curator of the exhibition

(1) A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking.

(2) The Buckingham Π theorem is the fundamental theorem of dimensional analysis; it is a mathematical formula allowing for simplifying dimensions in study.

(3) Reference to the cave paintings made in the Cantabrian caves of Altamira, Spain.

(4) Reference to the fresco Holy Trinity, carried out by Italian Renaissance painter Masaccio and considered one of the first paintings incorporating Modern Age perspective.

(5) Reference to the famous dome of the Museum Cabañas in Guadalajara, Mexico, painted by muralist José Clemente Orozco.

(6) A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking.

(7) For Immanuel Kant the noumenon is the “thing-in-itself.”

(8) Epistemological proposal according to which scientific theories are neither true nor false, but instead instruments for prediction.

(9) Reference to theoretical physicist Richard Feynman, who stated that “the universe doesn’t have just a single history, but every possible history.”

Photo: Ramiro Chaves