artnexus #94

From the start, a complex selection of materials has characterized the work of Tomás Espina (Buenos Aires, 1975): gunpowder on paper, wood, or canvas; tar; charcoal—elements that are at once aggressive and unstable. These resources bring forth images where the presence of violence is revealed for the decisive role it plays but also fire as a regenerative element. 

This is why the themes of Espina’s representations can allude to repression or to birds launching into flight, or they can turn abstract. And despite working with preexisting images taken from news photographs or from art history, his works force viewers to formulate questions, to read between the lines, given the multiplicity of interpretations that his mysterious images suggest as they appropriate a world of references that may come from movies, literature, or our own memories. It would seem that the artist expects the viewer, in the last instance, to be responsible for reorganizing the information provided in haphazard ways. 

Each drawing, painting, or installation moves between clarity and diffusion, the evidence of the references on display, and the need to reorganize the information one perceives.

As the artist points out, the work on our cover “is part of a series of works made with soot on magazine paper. On the soot-covered paper, fragments of a sacred geometry emerge. The weightlessness of the soot renders the image fragile in the extreme, as it is juxtaposed to the accidental markings left by the process.” This series of drawings is titled Algebra. 

IVONNE PINI