GABRIEL SIERRA: RECALQUE

The artist has two different personalities; one is spiritual, and the other is creative.

Gabriel Sierra

An image is an image, just as an object is an object. But could an image be an object, or vice versa? And where can we find the true substance of an image? In the physical object or in the photographic representation of the object or thing? Is the spirit of an image found both in the referent and in the observer's emotion? Or is it in language? And how can we communicate with it?

All these questions form the central theme or main concern of Gabriel Sierra's current project—his second solo exhibition at Luisa Strina.

Through objects, films, and images, the artist explores the visual codes of everyday objects, raising questions about why we create images and things, questioning the images themselves, and the persistence of archetypal images on the retina from the general world and the specific world of visual arts.

In this set of new works, the perception of matter and the perception of the physical world are inseparable from the abstract nature of imagination, which is where ideas, phenomena like dreams, the perception of invisible forces, and emotions arise.

The title of the exhibition is taken from the title of some pieces that make up the show: a cast iron pot with a hole; a collage; a slide projector; and a 16mm projected film. The word Recalque can mean many different things. For example, in Spanish, it refers to the action of repeating something multiple times, emphasizing how the words are written. In Portuguese, it refers to a structural failure of a building caused by soil settlement. It is also a fundamental concept of repression in the psychoanalytic theory developed by Sigmund Freud.

The image of an object is in the object as much as it is in our minds. Things exist in and of themselves, unlike us who are merely human and perceive things and the world as we are. Or, sometimes, as we are not.