Round Trip (2023)

round trip
Fernando Moure April 2023

The series included in Sebastián Boesmi's exhibition "Round Trip" are constructed from expressive media familiar and experimental in his work, such as line, painting, three-dimensionality, moving images, and sound. This title gives meaning to the idea of a journey and a two-way transit: one exploring the media dynamism and the other the artist's spatial, temporal, and mental nomadism.

Based in Madrid since 2019, after extended stays in New York, Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona, and Berlin, this artist of travel, or peripatetic creator that is Sebastián Boesmi, has been continuously reflecting on the meaning of these movements and drifts. An artist-philosopher whose artistic and personal trajectory is marked by his turbulent and migrant life, his work is the fruit of an extraordinary imagination, creating a unique aesthetic, symbolic, and conceptual world.

A versatile author, constantly searching for themes and avenues of expression, whose works speak to us of ontologies, identities, and existential aspects that not only fit within the human realm but also with physical reality: his depicted worlds can include animals, plants, and machines, words or things. A semantic jumble capable of generating thoughts that challenge and contrast our own certainties and uncertainties.

This exhibition focuses on the recurring motifs in Sebastián Boesmi's complex, contemporary, and simultaneously arcane discourse. It presents an iconography that serves to explain experience, personal origins, and foundational narratives.

Spaces of abundance

The works and their narratives create counter-mythologies that challenge humanist or anthropocentric narratives. The artist establishes a mythical substratum of origins, with cosmogonic undertones, fusing diverse sources that have interested him throughout his career: astronomy, natural sciences, music, science fiction, and popular culture.

Within these spaces of life and experience identified in the pieces, it is worthwhile to reflect on the concept of a biome . A biome is a habitat and dynamic set of plants, animals, microorganisms, and surrounding surplus (or dead) nature, which interacts as a functional unit, a plural community.

Ida y Vuelta is also a place and time for experimenting with the coexistence of creative systems obtained through machine technology. Movement, curiosity, and exploration are the driving forces behind the expansion of this practice, proposing to advance and reformulate visionary practices, such as video art, a format little explored in our scene.

From three large screens, restless landscapes of formal transformation are projected, in which sound flows synchronized with the moving image, affirming circularity or dancing in the compositional spiral. In sequence and in a back-and-forth motion, the videos seek to synesthetically integrate the rest of the works into a shared habitat within the open space of the exhibition.

Boesmi's graphic and pictorial talent lends itself perfectly to the digital manipulation of animation. The animated paintings flow, expand, and shimmer, proliferating in a glow of cool and warm light. Dazzling, they expand, churning and resonating all around us. Masses of line and paint rise like living giants above storms and waves, flooding the screen with luminous rain and schematic ripples in magnificent landscapes.

Installed in a corner of the gallery, the three videos lend themselves perfectly to digital manipulation of the animation, converging into a more tactile, absorbing, and immersive experience. Boesmi's relational partnership with the sound and video artists involved in the exhibition project has crystallized in recent months. The sound art accompanying the animation was composed by Javier Rodríguez, and the digital editing is by Camilo Moreno. Through these interactions, the artist proposes to advance and reformulate visionary practices, which give shape to these video art pieces.

In the videos, solid planes slowly unfold or disappear around the composition. Gaseous and liquid blocks overflow to reveal layers that emerge in combinations of scarlet, nuclear orange, or ultramarine, only to be veiled in atmospheres that shimmer in cool and warm glows. Open, exquisitely inflated lines, in dazzling hues, expand, churning and vibrating radially.

Three light sculptures are positioned high up in the room, complementing the paintings and videos. Neon is combined with other materials such as bronze and iron; they become silhouettes against the screens and paintings, their spherical, rounded, and ineffable forms fitting together.

Motivations and imaginaries

Possible theoretical paths can be traced to imagine relationships between the forms contained in Boesmi's artifacts, as many as the abundant constellations that populate these icons, like a river of curves and meanders that converge in the idea of journey, of back and forth, of energetic tension.

Some of these metaphors revolve around and obey laws of formal and thematic relationships, and in their ebb and flow they describe trajectories that reinforce the initial narrative of change, of searching. Glazes that sediment layers of information behind a therapeutic light, emanating from Sebastián's brushes, capable of restoring faith in painting, in the mystery and ecstasy of expanding medially.

As we said, from his identification with the phyto-zoomorphic world, posthumanism or the cyborg, what is evident in this work is the absorption of cultural elements from the places where he worked and lived, as well as his interest in non-canonical forms or mythologies erased from history or from others to come.

With the exhibition Ida y Vuelta (Round Trip) , Boesmi—for whom the concept of metamorphosis and transformation is fundamental—applies in this staging to a diaphanous yet maximalist exhibition design. The works coexist on a discursive axis of narrative and formal baggage in constant correspondence, even amidst the variety of formats.

The selection of works gathered here interprets the creative geographies of Sebastián Boesmi around recurring ideas and themes such as landscape or personal and social identity, metaphorized in accumulations of anthropoid beings, industrial objects or signs of the digital imprint on culture.

The exhibition recreates a space, a place whose morphology of representations converges in a kind of energetic tension. Between an imaginary mural and a vaporous landscape, the term " landscape" here lies at the limit, like a portal pointing to submerged and gaseous worlds. From line to pixel, the two-dimensional works, the solid and light volumes, as well as the sound, can be perceived in the exhibition as a single whole, aspiring to a Gesamtkunstwerk , or total work of art, rather than a series of individual pieces.

Coda: In Praise of Travel

Among us, in Paraguay, the artist uniquely represents an art concerned with imaginary worlds, as well as the creation of a distinctive and unique visual identity, confronting us with gesturally organic compositions whose intense transmediality we point out in Ida y Vuelta .

An atlas of illustrations, paintings, sculptures, and animated and sound images, transformed or digested into a work that can be a gateway to worlds near or far; declared as a portal to the generous and empathetic jungle of Sebastián Boesmi. Boesmi's journey is also through the liminal spaces between dream and wakefulness, between lucidity and frenzy, recounting this voyage in a playful and hermetic expression, one that allows him to give form to the experiences of physical, mental, and spiritual nomadism.

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