SOUTH/SUD (2011)

A person with a fluent way of speaking and a relaxed demeanor, there's one question that, nevertheless, would put me on the spot every time he's asked it, if I were Sebastián Boesmi. And it shouldn't be a complicated question, especially when it touches on something so basic to his biography: "Sebastián, where are you from?"

Technically, our artist was born in Salta, Argentina, in 1980. But his formal training took place at the National University of Asunción in Paraguay (he is very clear that this is his context), and was later completed in New York (Art Students League). He currently lives and works in Madrid, Spain. In between, he has spent varying degrees of time in Johannesburg, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Miami, and Barcelona. It's understandable that he finds it difficult to define himself. And it's understandable that his work deals with displacement and identity.

“I’m interested in hybridity , in what defies rigid definitions,” she explains. “In this sense, I seek to decolonize what I’ve learned, dismantle what’s given, question the established order, and imbue what is taken for granted with new meaning. Through my images , I reconstruct narratives and imagine a dialectic between what seems fixed and what is in constant flux.” In this context, it’s hardly surprising that this project for the Matices gallery is titled “ Order in Chaos .”

And at the heart of it all, painting (or drawing, which is what structures it). But also technology. After all, painting itself is a technique. Boesmi reminds me of Donna Haraway and Ursula K. Le Guin:

“ To use the world well, to stop wasting it and our time in it, we have to learn other ways of being and existing in it. ” 1.

And above all, it's about taking a stand, because, as McLuhan announced decades ago, the medium is the message , and the sooner we 'make peace' with tools that are irreversible, the sooner we'll accept the evidence. Furthermore, history always proves us right, and neither photography killed painting, nor acrylics killed oil paint .

So, let's return to the paintings Sebastián Boesmi presents in this exhibition and accept that, through them, he explores the concept of displacement, of camouflage. Undoubtedly, the indexicality and self-organization of his elements, sometimes more figurative, sometimes more abstract, are also explored. Order in chaos. Art itself also represents an attempt to generate a certain order within that chaos, this artist reminds me, which now brings to mind José Bergamín's 'The Mystery Trembles.'

'Picasso Furious' 2, when the Spaniard speaks of ' painting well ' and 'painting badly ' while reflecting on Goya. Painting badly can be painting well, because painting well is doing it as one wants. Boesmi paints in an effort to find in contrast not what differentiates, but what marks the alternative (putting the organic into dialogue with the artificial, the complex with the simple, light with shadow, the stain with the firm stroke...), or what allows the encounter of the disparate.