Light in the Absence of Light

"Let the makers of images install their works in temples so they may meditate on the deities which are the subjects of devotion ..."

Sukracharya

Brahma Sutra, 3,2,10

Where are the deities to whom the artist devotes the building of palaces? Until now no one has seen them. Human beings are content to talk about their existence as voices, murmurings that seep into the soul and whisper the unnamable. It is to those deities, lost in the mists of time, to whom the artist elevates his song, for which the work is created. Each image identifies beauty, absence/presence, which is then delivered to humanity as a vote for the absurd, the impossible in the hand of man. We are the anxious creatures of gods. We look for them at every turn. Our past is full of these sites where we have solicited their presence: that is how temples are formed - ritual cities that we return to occasionally as orphans seeking comfort. That is where the artist will go to find the material for his work.

But at some point man forgot about the making of temples and decided to build machines. His ambition: control of the absolute. And in this way he conquered, exceeding limits he never even conceived. Which are the ruins that speak of that failure, of that un-building, where are their remains? From ancient times until the trans-culture, the philosopher seeks truth in order identify it and the artist seeks to make an image to explain that truth. The Neo-Baroque created theaters, breathtaking mixtures of fiction and glimpses into the melancholic by means of simulacra; veils that furl and unfurl only as an exercise of pure appearance. Irretrievable loss of essence that is content to disguise and interpret endlessly those myths and legends whose condition will only be a representation. The spectacle.

To quote the philosopher Theodor Adorno, in his Aesthetic Theory: "In order to survive in the midst of an extremely dark reality, works of art that do not want to sell themselves as facile advice, must be equal to that reality. Radical art is the same as dark art, art whose main color is black," Light In the Absence of Light; a space created by Hector Bitar, in which the absence of light makes its presence felt. Memory, retold in ruins, residues that inhabit no space, no time, without history. Theater in which everything happens in silence: the origin and mystery of artistic creation. The remains of a ritual without gods.

Just as Bitar himself notes "The transmutation of the elements creates in me a hypnotic contemplative state"  - is another way to consider the veil and warn of the unforeseen: imaginary ruins that are testimonies to a civilization which failed to be told, which were lost in the universe as so many other possibilities that never were. The remains of cities never built, buildings demolished before ever being built for a society that never existed. The world succumbs to the ruins, through which history is told and each of its stones is the evidence of decadence. The ruins we see today will be collected as treasures of undreamed dreams, of impermanence and of a non-future; the absence of color in each of the pieces allow us to drill in deliberate acts of construction. Gold is the symbol of the deity, weapon of light that seeks to counter oblivion and generate meaning. Man insists on constructing a history that inevitably condemns him to discover his mortality, the artist strives to create images that remind us that we are more than that.

Susan Crowley 

Curator

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