Too Many Things (2024)

THE EXPANSION OF TOO MANY THINGS
Ticio Escobar . Asunción, June 2024.

Boesmi's exhibition , Too Many Things , at Galería Matices, encompasses clearly defined fields of techniques, materials, and procedures: paintings, 3D prints, sculptures, and video. However, the transmedia nature of his work not only establishes subtle connections between these areas but also causes them to continually overlap, blurring the boundaries; creating intermediate , wavering zones, and even opening up new spaces .

This expansive vocation is one of the characteristics of Boesmi's work: painting runs transversally through his entire production; as does the use of technological devices and sculptural objects whose forms circulate in diverse directions, naturally crossing the boundaries of those areas.

This unstable interweaving conditions and expands the field
specific to the different proposals, which become site pieces
specifically; facilities, in a broad sense.

The continuous transit between diverse media and its inscription in a
Contingent space implies, on the one hand, the action of shared concepts; on the other hand, it reveals the enactment of one of those concepts, fundamental in his work: the idea of ​​movement and incessant becoming, of mutation and journey .

Everything in that work is bustling and moving, disappearing and reappearing; it leaves
To glimpse the other in each form, the aftermath of every moment, the background and the beyond of each place. Diversity weaves plots that, in turn, are fluctuating and push the figures out of themselves, preventing any stable position, any rootedness or accommodation in space.

Boesmi intensifies the image's most distinctive faculty: that of establishing links between different, opposing, and even contradictory terms. The image relates what is to what is not and, from this strange paradox, places the real and the virtual on equal footing and links the actual and the possible . This multifaceted capacity of the image allows it to connect mechanical or manual labor with technological processes, as well as to equate graphic, pictorial, and spatial operations and to reconcile the organic and the inorganic.

Therefore, for Boesmi, the movement between different physical, technical, and even ontological realms—a central question in contemporary art—is not a forced operation: the images slide or forge their own path, adapting to different contexts and sometimes even mimicking each medium. In this way, they alter and transform their forms and become partly identified with others. These crossings are not necessarily peaceful; they often involve confrontations and provoke conflicts that are not always resolved . In the latter case, the tensions between opposing forms remain latent , transformed into energies that nourish the work , pushing its differences from within and enlivening the presence of its distinct propositions.

The protean qualities of the image allow the artist to work with the third dimension of sculpture using the same chromatic criteria and materials employed in other processes. He does so by embracing the technical particularities of each medium: the sculptures are made with bioplastics derived from the fermentation of cassava and corn, combined with ceramics and 3D printed materials . Just as Boesmi explores and exploits the capabilities of the image, he also investigates and utilizes the possibilities that technology presents in diverse fields. But, once again, technology does not appear detached from other means of producing artwork; it acts in concert with craftsmanship. The sculptures are handcrafted and are unique pieces. They arise by navigating the age-old debate between the artisanal, the technological, and the artistic.

At one point, sculpture moves on the edge of three-dimensionality and even transcends it. Sculptures made of neon and suspended on walls feed on light, appropriating its essential principles (intensity, ephemerality, versatility) and, without abandoning the memory of lightning or severing their ties to color, they become related to writing: to the street graffiti of Asunción, the stark figures of a city that represses its cries. This kinship produces other shifts: the becoming of image-text in sculpture; but also, and primarily, in painting.

Boesmi's painting occupies a defined yet somewhat open space. Perhaps its singularity, and at times its autonomy, are defined as much by the narrative quality of his works as by the specificity of his technique. The artist creates invented spaces, poised between dreamlike figuration, calculated discourse, and unbridled fiction. They are landscapes or dimensions with no references other than their own forms and colors.

On the one hand, these places— dystopian at times—are inhabited or traversed by abstract signs or clearly representational forms, disconnected from one another, detached from any support (mutant animals, human profiles, and truncated objects). They are beings with indistinct outlines, incomplete organisms or those in the process of formation, perhaps spectral signals : the secret passages between the environment, human subjectivity, and the digitization of the world produce intermediate stages, sketches of bodies in transit . On the other hand, the abstract strokes that seethe in the work aim to become part of writing; they are post-verbal letters or scripts , fragments of statements or figures of an unknown language endowed with the same expressive value as colors, textures, or forms. The painting itself must be approached in terms of the great rite of passage that is Boesmi's work: it projects itself beyond the flat and the object-like and enters the unreal domains governed by virtuality without abandoning its pictorial identity.

Virtuality . It seems strange that an artist so attentive to the density of nature, the challenges of matter, and the human condition in the concrete world, would enthusiastically dedicate himself to exploring the possibilities of digital imagery. This eagerness is justified when we realize that part of painting's expansion unfolds through the leap from canvas to screen. Painting is, after all, a laborious manual process that encourages us to look beyond the visible and, therefore, enables us to interpret reality (whatever it may be) through both plastic strokes and pixels. The off-screen space that art enables forces us to imagine the other side, appealing to all the resources that sharpen perception, investigating all the systems that culture facilitates in each era. Boesmi glimpses this parallel scene, sustained by the power of imagination and the subtle breath of humor. At times, irony produces detours and opens cracks that allow us to view the theater of representation with a certain distance and glimpse the passageways that connect it to its outside world. At other times, the scene itself ignores the limits of the curtain, transcends the proscenium arch, and compels the audience to leap beyond its walls: the performance space coincides with that of the audience. Boesmi's postulates of interactivity within the work, and consequently his challenge to the merely passive role of the spectator, lead him to cross the threshold of the image, venture into the space beyond the stage, and promote audience participation through workshops and other activities in addition to the exhibition. With this pragmatic move, the artist does not complete the creative act , which is necessarily unfinished , but rather enriches it with a powerful gesture that, once again, propels the image to expand its reach beyond the closed domain of any given medium.