MARIANO SARDÓN EXHIBITS “SOUFFLE” AT RUTH BENZACAR GALLERY

Working for years in an interdisciplinary way between Neuroscience and Art, Sardón acquires a special interest in the complementarity and binary opposition as phenomena in the visible as well as in the invisible.

The series of works exhibited is the result of projects that the artist has carried out in different places and times. The term Souffle, French, has multiple meanings: to exhale loudly, pant, produce air movement; blow out a candle, destroy by a violent explosion, send air or gas through something, blow the glass to shape it; to whisper; amaze; ... among others.

In all these meanings the air is implied as an invisible and present material. Air is the complement of spaces, it occupies what it does not occupy. It is given to us regardless of our awareness and allows us to be on earth. We are born and must take air for the first time, and we die not before having exhaled the last breath. It is a formless material that may well be a metaphor for much of what we do not notice but sustains us.

In all these works some of these associations are articulated with a greater or lesser accent both metaphorically and materially. On the other hand, they all involve technology, which, like air, embeds our lives in an already invisible and interdependent technosphere. The success of the technology of this century, it could be said, lies in users not paying attention to its existence, since it is present in everything that crosses us.

So the subtraction operation in these works does not distinguish the artificial from the natural; It is in this ambiguous area between the present form and its absent complement that the body may well be located or implicated. Sardón's artistic operations disassemble the human and the technological in an indistinguishable way with sometimes similar implications. "Like a respirator is part of our lungs, like a pacemaker is an extension of our body."