Ruth Benzacar Art Gallery opens its 2022 season presenting Compostasmas by Carlos Huffmann in Room 1.
The paintings and sculptures that make up the exhibition inhabit liminal territories and explore an expanded notion of the boundary as a site of enunciation and blossoming. The artist contrasts the explosion of vitality that fuels decomposition processes with the entropic externality of daily social consumption, and there seeks his poetic energies.
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Compostasmas
Major crises bring us face to face with extremes—sometimes even with the possibility of extinction. Discomfort in democracy. Economic collapse. COVID-19. A new European war. A normality shattered into a thousand pieces. Yet crisis also points the way toward survival and transformation: a crisis or metamorphosis of the (new) normal. We come from a fragmented world marked by patchwork and multipolarity, where a thousand realities coexist and boundaries are undefined. The boundaries between countries and species—the virus can traffic DNA between completely different beings. The boundaries between the digital and the “material” worlds: between the fungible and the irreplaceable.
The irruption of the Earth—that is, the eruption of the climate crisis and the awareness of it, sometimes expressed through the concept of the Anthropocene—and the digital disruption—the crisis generated by technical innovations and linked to the algorithmic automation of social life—are deeply connected. One feeds the other: under the Anthropocene hypothesis, today’s climate crisis is a side effect of technological evolution. In that collapse of distinctions lies the key to all other emergencies. It is within that fissure between categories that we must search for temporary answers.
Art, like the human species, seeks its course within this new landscape. Questions emerge about the longevity of its objects, the carbon footprint of fairs and biennials, and the renewed need to offer—through its images and discourses—a platform from which to foster new forms of recognition. Perhaps utopia is the survival that depends on the coexistence of humans and non-humans, while the mystery of the future’s form remains absolute and decisive. The present is full of both horror and joy. Compostasmas investigates an industrialization that blends emerging technologies with artisanal traditions in order to consider the potentialities of the plausible. It is a path born from the very act of withdrawing for two years from the old normality into a world that—through trauma and acceleration—will inevitably become something else, from which new ways of living will emerge. Within the memory of the objects that make up each sculpture in this exhibition are open-source prostheses designed to be 3D-printed to fit whoever needs them; found objects from the “sand” the city produces through its own movement; clay-modeled figures; studio materials; traces of gestures; and titles borrowed from the history of twentieth-century Argentine painting.
We have witnessed the revenge of the real (the virus and its consequences) in the age of simulacra. The liminal spaces of the gallery have been populated by a search that connects physical objects with a vast array of records—from the most analog/biological fields to the most digitalized ones. Low-poly models made in virtual reality coexist with durable, recyclable materials. We need to return to things themselves in this long period of still-undefined edges we tentatively call “post-pandemic.” In its hybrid image, art has the chance to expose the contradictions of the discursive world as mere artifacts of the incomplete nature of language. A good place to start is to propose a new beginning—one where taking sides is not what matters, but asking the most elementary question of all: Do we believe in reality? Compostasmas by Carlos Huffmann invites us to experience a fragment of the future of that, perhaps unconscious, general strategy.
Tomás Borovinsky
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The paintings and sculptures that compose Compostasmas inhabit liminal territories and explore an expanded notion of the boundary as a site of enunciation and flourishing. The artist contrasts the explosion of vitality driving processes of decomposition with the entropic externality of daily social consumption, and from there draws his poetic energies. The exhibition’s title refers to forms that emerge from the hybridization of techniques, theoretical references, discourses, and the history of Argentine art, signaling how artistic labor participates as a process of creating both individual and collective memory.
The new sculptures result from a research and development process carried out in collaboration with designers, technicians, artisans, and industrial producers. The exhibition comprises nine sculptural pieces in painted aluminum and six paintings made with oil, acrylic, and UV printing on burlap. All the pieces are installed in such a way as to highlight their boundary zones: where the wall meets the floor, the ground meets the subsoil, and the exhibition space meets the gallery’s office area, where its commercial activities are conducted daily.
The nine aluminum pieces are three-dimensional interpretations of a series of the artist’s paintings: in them, a still-human face—hovering between life and death—emerges from the surface of a mound of earth to deliver an apparently paradoxical message that, upon inspection, reveals multiple layers of meaning. The new sculptures seek to generate an assemblage of textures and construction methods through a process that included virtual reality tools, 3D printing, traditional sculptural modeling in various materials, and found objects. The final object, made entirely of aluminum and later polychromed with oil paint, was produced using an adaptation of techniques employed in bronze casting.
The paintings, stored at a height that positions them partially above the exhibition space, are images created with both digital and analog techniques and can be accessed by the public only via a screen. Exploring the massive migration of vital activity into the internet that took place during the 2020 global pandemic, these pieces may be transformed into non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as an alternative form of collecting. In such cases, a frontal photograph of the painting will be “tokenized” as an NFT, and the pictorial layer will be mechanically removed, allowing the canvas and stretcher to be reused for the production of new paintings. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, these works remain in a superposed state—simultaneously physical and digital “objects.”
Carlos Huffmann’s work condenses hybrid imaginaries in drawings, paintings, sculptures, installations, and texts. In some of his pieces, the artist repurposes discarded machinery or agricultural elements, recovering not only their material value but also reactivating their histories and energies: what was once oriented toward production becomes an artwork that instrumentalizes the phantasmagoria of its former life. He builds amulet-objects and totem-sculptures, creating installations that function as ritual settings of a shamanic ecology that recycles generations of technology.
His works unfold stories built through diverse materials and procedures, balancing between archaeology and fictional genealogy of the recent past. He populates highway horizons, public squares, or the white cube of the gallery with images and situations where chaos and order, technology and ruin, coexist. His practice finds a fertile tension between the grand scale dominating his exhibitions and the research laboratory embodied in his countless notebooks, digital and paper drawings, and magazine interventions. In some of his most emblematic works, he transforms harvesters, luxury cars, or racing trucks into protagonists of dystopian scenes set in dusty Patagonian landscapes or the stubbly pampas—as if they were film sets for a South American, apocryphal science fiction.
In Huffmann’s works, one can read several layers of sedimentation consolidated through a back-and-forth between the analog and the digital. His pieces reflect on the complexity and contradictions of the image and its elusive degrees of verisimilitude in contemporary life. Sometimes he begins with photographs—his own or from advertisements—and intervenes on them through a painting practice steeped in mass-media imagery, which he draws back from various temporalities: traces of anime and video games, the pixel as a unit of meaning from the early 2000s, punk slogans in English, bones, skulls, idealizations of luxury consumption, and almost endearing portraits of old hardware models.
Throughout his production, Huffmann unfolds a poetics of permanent crisis, in which obsolete and fragmentary objects become metaphors for the existences that persist and bloom on the margins of the technocratic system—one that spreads equally across urban and rural zones.
