Infinitude. Es Baluard Collection

After the last experience in the MAC of Chile in 2017, and the collaboration involving the work of Ana Gallardo at the CCE (Spanish Cultural Centre, Montevideo) in 2018, Es Baluard and BIENALSUR determined to publicise the Collection in a new phase highlighting the contemporary creative proposals of the works in it which have a bearing on the idea of Landscape and Sustainability.

On an island, the horizon is the constant reference point, the axis around which realities revolve, the pole of attraction where the end is the beginning and vice versa; it is the metaphor of distance or the geometry for the inner gaze. We come from an archipelago in the Mediterranean, a sea that was the cradle of civilisation over its history and in its present, a platform of cruise liners and migrant boats, of poetry and economics, of pristine landscapes or of hotel skylines, of nostalgia and of emotion.

Because of its actual, incontestable presence, and equally because of its omnipresence, vastness imposes itself as a dominant dimension before the landscape, with the safety of knowing that there is always something beyond, in the outside-the-picture, on the other side, that which we know exists even though we cannot see it: the unlimited.

Alongside vastness, continuous diversity, fleetingness and change are some of the data which define identity marks in landscapes and which therefore present themselves as challenges for a sensitive experience.

The problem of space – continuous, infinite, unavoidable – imposes itself on artists from different latitudes who receive it both to underscore it, in affirmative terms, and to reinvent it conceptually, or intervene on it, seeking effects and the most diverse aesthetical and political interpretations. Because it is the register of space and its violation, because it persistently lies in wait as a reference image to be affirmed or denied, defended, parodied or intervened on, what it cannot be, without any doubt, is neutralised: in it, everything from utopian dimensions to political assignations or demands are condensed, everything from the registers of visual experience to conceptual elaborations.

The exhibition «Infinitude. Es Baluard Collection» is made up of a selection belonging to the museum collection, made by Nekane Aramburu, its Director until March 17, 2019, and Diana Wechsler, Artistic – Academic Director of BIENALSUR.