As in any intimacy, there is something of the order of the unknown that emerges without being codified. It appears. Nothing more. Due to its proximity, like infrasound, it cannot be fully understood. It is experienced. It happens. And in some unclear way, it materializes. And within that materialization, everything makes sense.
And this thing that emerges, in Marcos Mangani and Luciana Rondolini’s Latest Revelations (Últimas revelaciones), does so from the abyss of a dark room. The lights are minimal and timid, seemingly asking for permission to dare to point. They sway guiltily over strange objects and surfaces, as if dropped from an outburst. These objects exert a double negation of the spectator: by rebelling against the tyranny of sight and forcing us to perceive the setting through the textures and aromas that take over the space; and by inviting us to partake in the authors’ confessions, which are our own, and their questions, which are also ours. That is to say, the commitment must be total—it is not enough to look, and it is insufficient to peer in from a distance.
The blackness forces us to submerge ourselves blindly, and as we navigate the space, a conversation between the artists—in a peculiar audio-guide format full of brutal honesty—whispers in our ear. Tempting us to know their secrets, it spits a question that echoes through the room: «how much courage does it take to accept that thing that one knows and cannot ignore.» That is what this visit is about: accepting that thing that is there, impossible to ignore, and finding in it a personal and shared truth—once unknown, now perceived.
What Mangani and Rondolini propose is a journey through an intimate and harrowing universe: that of confession. And in their investigations, what is laid bare is the honesty of the thing as such, the thingness of the thing, and the consequences of its being there, surrendered to the passage of time, to its coexistence with the spectator who traverses it. What is revealed here is the unfolding of matter, and with it, the discovery of what we cannot (yet) see clearly.
The works crawl along the floor, or hang from the ceiling, or stand stoic and cold, and even babble from the wall, shushing their silent image. Fragile yet tenacious, like any confession that needs to be nurtured and protected from the outside world, where the act of saying slips through what has been said. There is an echo of secrets floating in the air of the room, and each work encloses its own universe of meaning, its own story, which it whispers in our ear while luring us like a siren; and its beauty seduces us, losing us in the nonsense of abstraction and in the sea of possibilities delivered by that which is cast into the passage of time, into transformation and metamorphosis. We are accomplices to the intimacy of these textures. Victims and victimizers of the passage of time—and this dark, cold staging is proof of it.
Federico Curutchet
2015