ALMAAZ

 

Julia Carrillo is undoubtedly one of the most attractive artists in the contemporary art scene in Mexico. Her constant interest in the intersections between science and art, as well as the poetic experience that results from them, is one of her personal marks. The light, the geometry, the study of bodies in the space, the tangible concrete and vibrant materiality.

In her piece ALMAAZ, whose title refers to a binary star located in Auriga, Carrillo marks a stellar metaphor. A metaphor that simply leads us to ask ourselves about the movement of a pair of celestial bodies, the radiance they emanate, the abstraction of distance, the desire for closeness, the conspiracy of light and also of shadow. The means of which it uses, lead us, on the other hand, to experience the possibility of transposition, and all kinds of small pulsations that Julia places in Almaaz.

The work, at first sight, seems to show as 'object-sculpture' of wood which 'floats' in the space of the gallery. With 90cm high, almost 3m long and 1m width, the object constantly disturbs the gravity of suspension. But the piece is not only what we see, a tangible-visible. In each of the ends, a window is opened to look at the inside of it. There we found, that the piece is also an ‘optical-device’, that is a device of to give to see. The exterior and the interior belong one to another without being completed. Both depend on the space that surrounds them, of the above, of the down, the light that is filtered, movement of those who run that outside. The uncertainty rises: while the exterior size is imposed because the reason for the eye is trained to measure and calculate everything that is presented to us, looking at the inside, that reason it blows apart. The sense of dimension is totally paradoxical inside; and here comes the aporia, because space simply expands. The interior pulls towards the interest of the look, and we turn to the possibility of the intangible phenomenon of fractals, the play of light, the consequences of the time-space and why not say, of the moving image. The filtered volume that articulates a very unexpected combination. In the midst of a world surrounded by technologies of surveillance, who are watching us control and register, emerges a practice that not radicalize a properly 'tough' stance, optical appliance makes a return to the days of contemplation and interaction playful. Invaluable times in Art History.

No doubt also reminiscent of Beckett, Light. His weakness. His yellow. His omnipresence as if every one of the nearly eighty thousand square centimeters of a surface total to issue its brightness. The panting that shakes him. He stops from time to time as a breath ending. Their stay will perhaps end [And yet] a few seconds after every start again.

The work is dynamic where her environment is dynamic. And those two eyes-windows, mirror in their passage towards the inside. There we expect a rigorous study of geometry, angles and mirrors in both media-mediations. Julia transformed the solid external stability to encourage the flow of light in play and the infinite sensory splitting.

The aesthetic experience can be an individual, but also tempted to interactive; if someone at that precise moment, looking out from the opposite window, which is unfolded, second by second, is the face of the other that ends, concludes and restart to be confused and lose with one's own.

 

Karla Jasso