artnexus #108

Eduardo Basualdo (Buenos Aires 1977) has developed his work in a border zone between drama and the visual arts. Alongside Victoriano Alonso, Hernán Soriano, Pedro Wainer, Manuel Heredia, and Eduardo Basualdo, he has been a member for the past 15 years of the Provisorio Permanente group (the name translates as “Provisional Permanent”), characterized by the participation of artists coming from diverse disciplines like the visual arts, the theater, filmmaking, and animation, interested, since the establishment of the group in 2003, in exploring the experimental possibilities of their respective fields. Basualdo’s personal work drives that experimental intention even deeper as he creates installations, sculptures, drawings, and objects. One particularity of Basualdo’s installations is his ability to deploy a variety of mythological referents that are brought into the present, astonishing viewers with his use of mystery and consternation in their composition, as he questions the boundaries of the observer’s body while confronting his audiences with a fear of the unknown. The work on our cover, La cabeza de Goliat (The Head of Goliath) was presented in 2014 at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, at the Musée d´Art Moderne et Contemporain in Toulouse, in 2017 and is currently on view at Buenos Aires’ La Usina del Arte. For the Buenos Aires version, the work’s original title, Teoría (Theory), was changed to one that makes reference to an essay by the renowned Argentine writer and critic Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, whose own La Cabeza de Goliat, from 1940, critiqued the weight of capital-city centralism in Argentina and described Buenos Aires as an outsize, deformed head for the rest of the country. The material hanging overhead is metal, a type of steel that Basualdo molded into a crumpled mass resembling a rock. Basualdo’s statement that “art is not beauty but reflection” applies to this giant head, which prompts us to consider how, as big-city dwellers, we are absorbed by a gargantuan head that has lost its ability to connect with the rest of the body.
IVONNE PINI