Sebastián Boesmi: Image and Color
Regarding the artist's exhibition, currently on display at Galería Fuga Villa Morra.
Sebastián Boesmi: Image and Color
The pictorial approach to the image involves an exercise in inversion in which different layers of mediation intensify a distance: a visual impression reaches the eye's sensitivity; the gaze enacts an imaginary reconversion; this is mechanically translated through the mediating force of the body and the tools that aid in the application of pigments to another surface. Layer upon layer, the visual impression moves further away from the initial impulse; and yet, painting has been interpreted as a desperate search for approximation—to the impulse, to the truth of the image. Even when we refer to that image which does not originate from the horizon of the concrete, but from the emotional or ideological realms.
Painting is also an orchestration of color. The gaze delves into sensitive aspects of both the concrete, material world—corresponding to physical life—and the mental operations involving discourse or ideas. Articulated as a language, color assumes semantic roles that, through temperature or contrast, become an intensified, perceptible form. Through the pictorial gesture, it was once possible to reach imagined truths of the world, and their materialization on surfaces—in the West, the canvas would become the hegemonic medium for this practice—posed a challenge to boundaries that only poetry can overcome.
Sebastián Boesmi's recent work connects with elemental moments of the painterly gesture, thrust into a context where the hegemony of visual images has been usurped by the digital onslaught. Like other artists challenged by this shift, Boesmi belongs to a lineage whose biographical chronology allowed him to experience this transition, and this very fact has provided him with the necessary tools to execute the return. It is not merely a nostalgic nod, but a practice deeply rooted in the mechanisms that allow humans to interpret and grasp reality. Computers, cell phones, and smartphones have only been among us for a few decades, but for tens of thousands of years, human beings have trained their hand to hold a brush and inscribe desires and dreams on surfaces.
This feeling is recaptured in Boesmi's approach to working with form, where curvilinear patterns don't always allude to the freedom of the organic, but rather to the chaotic—and beautiful—forms resulting from exposure to disintegrating forces. The artist acts from a place of awe before the immeasurable cosmic powers, against which the fragility of any organic body would be incapable of preserving its stability. Boesmi refers to one of the forms that matter would assume in the face of these physical forces: in his piece Spaghettiification IV: From Here You Can See the Stars [1], the lines are worked with a thin, curvilinear stroke, alluding not only to the shape of spaghetti, but also to the stroke of writing or drawing—frequently approached by the artist through his own iconography, related to illustration and the aesthetics of urban art.
Sebastián Boesmi, Spaghettification IV (From Here You Can See the Stars), 2020. Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy
The way Boesmi creates his compositions also reinforces the movements of opposition and integration that emerge in the convergence of the organic and the digital: larger volumes are disrupted by smaller portions that sometimes reproduce the same motif, evoking a sense of fragmentation that perhaps corresponds to the digital language in which visual information originates from bits. The whole is made of small parts.
These bits are alluded to through the pictorial representation of the pixel, recurrent in some of the artist's pieces, in which he focuses again on the collision between organically tending forms and geometric patterns - which clearly refer to the pixel - as seen in Compressed Portrait or in the enigmatic Liquid Glitch.
Sebastián Boesmi, Compressed Portrait, 2022. Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy 
Sebastián Boesmi, The Warm Zone (UE). Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy
One of the most enigmatic pieces in the series is Demiurge: You have to believe it. It condenses the senses of absorption related precisely to the experience of the gaze exposed to a heterogeneity of media, but fundamentally an attitude of openness: the possibility of transforming and being transformed by the context. Boesmi's Demiurge perhaps crosses the chromatic portals that the artist develops, which refer to the liminal realm of visual configuration, both pictorial and digital: these portals perhaps condense a sense of intermediality: the passage through the customs of images, regardless of the technology of representation employed. Or, even, it is the boundary of translation, of all translations: when a reality assumes a perceptible form and is then capable of passing into another. And, precisely because color is also light, because it is the way in which materials are capable of absorbing and returning spectra of light to the gaze, Boesmi seeks to manipulate it. His sculptures and neon objects allow him to accomplish the imagined feat of painting not with ink but with light itself, with the intensified effect of the material manipulation involved in the pictorial act. 
In his painting ST, the pixel is the main motif. Represented without perfectionist pretensions, the pixel is subjected to the dominion of the imprecise pulse that transfers the image resulting from digital engineering to the unstable field of painting [2]. It is an operation of poetic justice that does not consist of punishing the digital image, but in embracing it through the pictorial stroke, exposing it to a horizon whose common denominator is human visual sensitivity.
Finally, Boesmi flirts with abandoning language, starting from an abstract tendency that becomes both the antithesis and the main argument of his pictorial discourse. In Nothing to Prove, the painting distances itself from figuration, even from the geometric elements that represent the digital universe that challenges it, or the schematizations of organic motifs, to allow the painting to speak through the eloquence of color. This place, the realm of the imagined, of the pure intensity that burns before both analog and digital eyes, is the ultimate truth of an artist's concern that lies in color. From there, the ancients who began to develop the language of words learned to recognize the language of things. Today, the color of ripe fruit and that of poisonous animals have something to say about the expansion of the spatial boundary into the digital dimensions that gleam in the palm of our hands.
Grades
[1] The artist is referring to spaghettification, an astrophysical concept that describes the stretching of objects in very strong, non-homogeneous gravitational fields. Interestingly, the space images we receive through telescopes are also reproduced in thousands of pixels.
[2] The patterns that the artist creates also evoke American textile pieces.
Editor's note: The exhibition to which this text refers is entitled The Colors of Imagination, and is located in Galería Fuga Villa Morra (Alfredo Seiferheld 5144 and Charles De Gaulle, Asunción).
Damián Cabrera is a writer, researcher, teacher, cultural manager, and curator. His work encompasses language, literature, borders, art, politics, and culture. He is a member of the Paraguay Chapter of the International Association of Art Critics and of the collectives Ediciones de la Ura and Red de Conceptualismos del Sur.
