Perfecta simetría

“Perfect Symmetry” places the viewer in a sinuous movement of various overlapping squares. The work consists of a grid of three layers of squares with different characteristics: The first layer is made up of black squares, the second by the white border of smaller squares, and the third by black squares with alpha smaller than the second level. The undulating, loop-shaped movement of the figures and the play with the background through the spaces generated between them raises a question: what is the error?

Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development

“Perfect Symmetry” places the viewer in a sinuous movement of various overlapping squares. An attempt at ambiguity can transform a pattern into something without limits. A question arises: what is the error? An Argentine poet named Maia Tarcic writes:

“I like things that look like a mistake. The memories are faulty, fractals, capricious.”

José Luis Brea, in Redefinition of artistic practices, brings artistic creation closer to the dreamlike nature of dreams:

“For more than one reason, we should compare the work of art to that of dreams: it is a production that induces surface formations that express, that roughly translate, an unbalanced state of energies. What is essential in them is not the form or appearance they acquire at a given moment, but the field of intensities - that is, the differential of potentials - in which they are carried out.”

Referring to this, we can deduce that the author suggests that, both in art and in dreams, various tensions come into play that are not necessarily easy to perceive. But the form has deeper layers, which only by connecting with them can we decipher or assimilate them into a certain way of feeling.

I once heard that we cannot dream images that in one way or another we have not perceived with our eyes open at some point. That is, they are linked to memory. Dreams play with error, they speak to us from error, perhaps through a person who, as the dream narrative progresses, becomes another, a place that feels like home but is not home, the vocal cords that go out wanting to trigger a scream, or the eternal endless fall that returns you awake in bed with a feeling of emptiness or of something that never came to an end. Dreams, says José Luis Brea, do not represent, and they do not represent because they are. The memory helps them to be, but I suppose it is only the basis for an endless number of questions that arise in the course of a few seconds:

“The work of art no longer has to do with representation. Would anyone think that the dream - that which induces an “apparent content” in those who relive the “latent” one, or recount it in the morning - has to do with “representation”? Of what? Negative: the work of the dream (…) is a melody of desire, never its painting; It is presence, never re-presentation. That mode of work that we call artistic must from now on be devoted to a similar production – in the sphere of the event, of presence: never again in that of representation.”

In this world that tries to move towards a utopian perfection, the irregularity caused by an error can throw us off. Sometimes so much so that our defense mechanism makes us ignore it. I remember a photograph on the sidewalk with my group of friends; We all came out with our eyes lit up because of the flash. There are those who wanted to take a “better photo” (yes, in quotes); a few saw in it the possibility of another meaning by opening the door. Friends with luminous eyes, like a kind of friendship from another world, from another planet.

Where does the error come from? Why is it so easy to identify it and, sometimes, so complex to reach out and reinterpret it? Is it the discomfort of noticing its presence that leads us to want to destroy it or simply ignore it? “Perfecta Symmetry” takes as reference the works of Vera Molnar called Hypertransformation (1974) and Interstices (1986). The artist develops in the field of computer art where she is characterized by playing with figures, superimposing them, creating patterns and breaking them with small irregularities. Symmetry is present in them and the game of error puts it in check. However, it is a concept that can become present in the mind of the observer: does there have to be symmetry to think about it?

Literature

BREA, José Luis. (2002). “Breve (y desordenado) antiglosario –o diccionario de tópicos- sobre el arte electrónico” en La era postmedia. Acción comunicativa, prácticas (post)artísticas y dispositivos neomediales. Salamanca: CASA Editorial, pp. 4-8

BREA, José Luis. (2008). “Redefinición de las prácticas artísticas (s. 21)” en El tercer umbral. Estatuto de las prácticas artísticas en la era del capitalismo cultural. Murcia: CENDEAC, pp. 106-113.

TARCIC, Maia. (2021). “Las cosas que parecen un error”. Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires: Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, pp. 47.