Ecstasy, unfaithfulness, and torment are some of the states that run through DESHUESADO, the exhibition by Carlos Herrera at Ruth Benzacar Art Gallery, which may be visited by appointment and in compliance with hygiene and safety measures.
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DESHUESADO is the prelude to a set of concepts and works that I have developed over the past ten years. Without attempting to return to lost paradises, but instead situated in the present, these works seem to land in order to execute the shadows of my thoughts. As if settling accounts with what is still fresh, with what does not carry nostalgia. A staging of that memory of abandonment. Ecstasy, unfaithfulness, and torment.
DESHUESADO confirms my effort to build from absence: an emotional archaeology of what has no form in my thoughts.
Perhaps these are things I cannot understand through language, but that I can see: hot nights, my parents as rural workers, the cultivation of flowers, greenhouses, the scent of chrysanthemums, roses with thorns, floral arrangements, owls, spiders, mice, the eucalyptus forest, the bones of animals, the bones of humans, wreaths, the cemetery, my bed, warm sheets, the flattened pillow, clothes thrown on the floor, employers, stairs, adobe walls, the smell of my friends, and our nighttime games.
I could say then that this exhibition is closest to what remains imprinted on my pillow. A place where my mind shelters each night when attempting to disappear, making rest into a bestial ecstasy, as if trying to fall asleep with my eyes open.
Is it possible to disappear?
I am sure it is.
Carlos Herrera, September 2020
The work of Carlos Herrera is unsettling not so much for the attempt to connect disparate objects and situations, but for the compressed discharge of simultaneous points of view that prevent the gaze from settling, keeping it suspended—floating between one side and the other; or resting briefly, gently, between both. In the complex scenes of art, the gaze finds no rest: it reveals and conceals, names and falls silent; it refers as much to what is as to what is not, to the visible and to what does not appear. It is the task of art to offer no respite to the gaze, because the gaze responds to the capricious movements of desire: the force that drives this useless and indispensable labor.
What does a bundle of used clothes mean? What of a heap of ordinary objects, or a crucifix desecrated or redeemed by profane rituals? They mean nothing. The jumble of clothes, objects, and bodies cannot be arranged into a clear and defined whole; its constant internal agitation generates unstable signs. Herrera’s work does not seek to produce meanings but to approach sense, whose void, far from exposing emptiness, signals the reserve of new possible significations—always uncertain, always in motion.
In the context of information culture and spectacle, keeping the question suspended constitutes a political gesture. The logic of the market—and behind it, the omnipotence of instrumental reason—seeks to make everything transparent for the sake of its accessibility as commodity.
The political dimension in Herrera’s work operates through two movements. The first suspends all certainty. Every attempt to grasp a clear and self-assured figure is blurred by poetic maneuvers that disorient a secure direction. This aims to declassify the categorical logic of the hegemonic system. People, objects, and events are classified by this system according to pre-established hierarchies naturalized by the status quo. To disturb the classification itself is more subversive than to represent any dissident situation. In art, the political does not occur through symbolic representation, but through its critique.
The second movement is not based on aestheticizing discordant situations, but on micropolitical gestures that reconfigure relationships shaped by hegemony, appealing to desire and the unconscious, to bodily affects and the forces of sensitivity and imagination. According to Brazilian theorist Suely Rolnik, the micropolitical act fights to recover the ethical destiny of the drive—that is, to restore the creative power that capitalism diverted toward profitable speculation.
In this micropolitical sense, Herrera’s work emphasizes the erotic charge and the perishable destiny of the body, the revelations of intuition, and the weight of materiality. His work does not gather objects and events because they are vulgar; he seeks them because they carry traces of a memory reluctant to be summoned literally. Smells, fluids, the grime of human flesh—its indiscreet traces—as well as the ordinariness of daily life, safeguard the residual secret of figures withdrawn from the realm of language. Phantoms, spontaneous associations, shadows, small silences, fleeting sensations evoke resonances of what lacks name and form. Only through lightning-like images can one glimpse, but never grasp, what stirs and calls insistently from beyond the final sign.
Ticio Escobar, September 2020, Asunción.
