The Colors of Imagination (2022)

SEBASTIAN BOESMI: IMAGE AND COLOR.
Damián Cabrera, October 2022.

The paintings Boesmi exhibits in this show sometimes shift tensely—due to the contrasts—between warm and cool tones, underscoring a sense of movement already hinted at in his handling of forms. But the artist also embraces gradations that evoke a sense of artificiality—perhaps achieved through the use of acrylic paint. These unnatural colors establish a path that outlines tonalities present in the industrial world, as well as in cosmic or digital realms. Cast into this chromatic landscape, organic forms seem to succumb to the inorganic and are consumed by it.

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 , 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.

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 .

In this series, Boesmi doesn't abandon the festive forms he has developed in his iconography: these are stylized or hybrid animals, approached, as mentioned, with an illustrative focus, a style particularly evident in the piece Open up, say Welcome . Meanwhile, his irony and dark humor are invoked by the anthropomorphic and futuristic form of VR Glasses and Pearl Necklace , an exaggerated anticipation of the appearances that might be assumed in the face of a potential intensification of the hegemony of the digital as a mediator of human experience.

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 traverses 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 able to absorb and reflect light spectra back to the eye, Boesmi seeks to manipulate it. Her sculptures and neon objects allow her 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 act of painting.

In his painting ST, the pixel is the central motif. Represented without any pretensions of perfection, the pixel is subjected to the unpredictable pulse that transfers the image resulting from digital engineering to the unstable realm of painting. It is an act of poetic justice that does not consist of punishing the digital image but rather in embracing it through the painterly 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 him, 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 pure intensity that burns before both analog and digital eyes, is the ultimate truth of an artist's preoccupation rooted 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 of poisonous animals has something to say about the expansion of the spatial boundary into the digital dimensions that gleam in the palm of our hands.

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.