ARDOR OF THE PEARL: THE WOUNDED GAZE AS ARCHIVE
In his new exhibition at VIGIL GONZALES Galería, Germán Sandoval explores the boundaries between perception, delirium, and political memory through an improbable hypothesis: hallucinations induced by tear gas.
In Ardor Perla, Sandoval constructs a visual and verbal narrative based on an impossible scientific conjecture: “there is no paper that proves tear gas induces hallucinations,” the artist clarifies. Yet, from this uncertainty, he weaves a framework that combines medical documents, experimental studies, and fragmentary testimonies to investigate how vision, when wounded, can become a form of creation.
The exhibition, inaugurated on September 26 at VIGIL GONZALES Galería, offers a journey through painting, text, and research. According to Sandoval, one of the central operations of the project is to “bring together fragments of disconnected knowledge, exceed strictly scientific boundaries, and subject them to a plastic and poetic reading.” From this intertwining emerges a “possible narrative,” where bodily experience also becomes a narrative experience.
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Vista de instalación "Germán Sandoval: Ardor perla". Cortesía VIGIL GONZALES Galería
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Vista de instalación "Germán Sandoval: Ardor perla". Cortesía VIGIL GONZALES Galería
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Vista de instalación "Germán Sandoval: Ardor perla". Cortesía VIGIL GONZALES Galería
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Vista de instalación "Germán Sandoval: Ardor perla". Cortesía VIGIL GONZALES Galería
The testimonies forming the textual core of the show—“collected, rewritten, and positioned on an ambiguous threshold between orality and literature”—function as counter-documents: accounts describing visions, injuries, and voices that struggle to answer the question, “What did you see?” This verbal archive intersects with two paintings evoking the chemical cloud of tear gas—“as both curtain and specter”—and with five works focused on the injured eye as a surface of inscription.
At this crossroads of physiology and politics, Sandoval tensions the boundaries between the visible and the imaginable. Painting acquires an almost tactile quality, as if trying to “give volume to the indescribable”: stains, lacerations, and visual residues materializing what eludes narrative. Ardor Perla does not limit itself to reflecting on physical violence. It also examines exile and historical distance, proposing “a displaced gaze, known to be unreliable but precisely because of that, rich in critical potential.” The impossibility of narrating objectively becomes a poetic tool: a way to reinscribe memory from its deviations and cracks, from what remains at the edges of vision.
Ardor Perla can be visited at VIGIL GONZALES Galería, Av. Presidente Roque Sáenz Peña 628, P4, Buenos Aires (Argentina).
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