Muestra Presente, Solo exhibition at Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes Franklin Rawson in San Juan, Argentina

11/06/2015

Muestra Presente, Solo exhibition at Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes Franklin Rawson in San Juan, Argentina

Jorge Sarsale, the weave of emptiness

A brief look at the history of paper reveals that, as far back as the II century B.C., the East was producing paper using silk, hemp, and other materials. Although in the West paper began to be used much later, its history is nevertheless long and rich. We normally think of paper as two-dimensional, but even the slightest wrinkle or fold makes us realize that countless other possibilities exist. Jorge Sarsale experiments in this exhibition with the materiality of the support he uses, but he goes far beyond that: by giving this materiality the real or virtual spaciality of painting, sculpture and installation, he establishes a fundamental dialogue with the emptiness of the exhibition room. That emptiness is what Sarsale truly weaves and unweaves, which means that his enterprise is anything but simple, as what he plays with is precisely what we are not usually capable of seeing. In a way, the characteristic that defines his work as contemporary is the attempt to confer visibility in his apparently abstract works to one of the dimensions which takes up most of the known universe: incorporeality.
Many of his works, without being in any way figurative, bring to mind natural objects by appealing to the biological memory for which weaves (the weaving of cells) are a fundament of organic life. The subtle intertwining of occupied space and emptiness, of the organic and the artificial, is the starting point from which Jorge Sarsale asks questions about the possible worlds that inhabit us and about the world we inhabit.
Virginia Agote, Director of the Franklin Rawson Bellas Artes Museum