Buenos Aires

SHELL FOR
SOMETHING INMENSE

GIMÉNEZ /

Curator
Text by Andrei Fernández

Mar. 27, 2025 — May. 17, 2025

About exhibition

Luciano Gimenez makes a shape appear. He does so with the support of an instrument designed for extrusion. I discover that the word “extrude” comes from the Latin extrudĕre: “to push out” or “to throw violently outward.” I think that this action, of giving shape to a mass through an opening, can be considered the first act of the collection of works Luciano presents at Galería Cott. Although the principle may lie much further back, much further, I take this birth, that of a shape thrown outward, as the beginning of my story.

This shape is the consequence of the obstinate repetition of a gesture. It exceeds the lifespan of the artist-craftsman-performer, in whose body knowledge lives that allows him to work with clay, to work with the clay. He dialogues with it, knows it, understands its textures, knows how temperatures transform it. He comprehends it. He thinks about its behavior. The behavior of the earth in relation to and reaction with water, air, and fire.

Through the presence of the shape, the reflection of a memory of use appears. It is a common, familiar, shared form. For more than ten thousand years, humans have molded clay to make containers and figures. Humanity has needed it since its beginning. Therefore, in this material lies the power to be a support, a container, a vessel, an offering. But Luciano makes it renounce its historical functionality.

What happens when the habitual function is annulled? What is revealed?

Ursula K. Le Guin recognizes as an essential gesture of the human being putting something you want – because it is useful, edible, or beautiful – into a bag, to take it home – which is another type of bag, a container for people – to later take it out and be able to eat it, share it, or store it. To put it in a bundle or on an altar or in a museum, and the next day do more of the same.

We talk a lot about producing, but in reality, we are mostly concerned with maintaining things, moving them. The task of the artist could be counted as a series of gestures, just as any job can be counted. People who dedicate themselves to carrying images from one place to another, contributing to their survival over time.

Luciano weaves with ceramics, or more precisely: he weaves ceramics. These meshes are pieces that stand on their own or can be supported but are exempt from solidity. They leave open spaces, silences that, in turn, structure their articulation and fragmentation.

The weaving is constructed like architecture, and at the same time, it is, as always, a skin. This time, the skin of something that doesn’t yet have a skeleton. Perhaps a home, perhaps a being to imagine. They could be a shell, a carapace, an armor, a skin.

“Armor for something immense” is a set of explorations of the material’s reaction and, also, possibilities of making new folds and volumes inhabiting the world. Trials of presence. They grow meshes by threading, joining, and supporting. The meshes take on a scale that questions possibilities of relationship with the human body, beyond contemplation. What/who will it shelter? What will it contain?

Here, ceramics are modules, synecdoche. The weaving is construction, praxis. In these structures composed of clay links, the same material usually used for making bricks, weaving and ceramics manifest themselves naked and in unity. Form and matter distance themselves from their common use but do not stray far.

Many times I have said and heard that art creates meaning. But now, when searching for a concrete example of this statement, what appears immediately is a question:
Does it create meaning for whom?

I write in my notebook: it’s not creating, it’s opening meaning. From there, an arrow toward the word wound. I draw another line that connects this opening of meaning to: making seams. I think that seams, weaving, can be scars of the opened meaning, surface.

In the Wichí language, the word tayhin names a fundamental continuous action: weaving, but this word is also used to say that something is built, rebuilt, or healed. If meaning is on the surface, when it opens, it becomes a wound, the questioning expands, it spills over. The territories and our bodies carry a thickness of scars on their skins, most of which are the result of wounds caused by growth.

What wounds do we create to feel that the meaning of the possible is growing?

Andrei Fernández
San Miguel de Tucumán, March 2025