La Casa por la Ventana

Ali Elmacı · Andrea Wolf · Armando de la Garza · Axel Ríos · Bruna Truffa · Carlos Gallardo · Carlos Damacio · Carolina Muñoz · Cecilia Avendaño · Chiachio & Giannone · Claudia Peña · Claudia Vásquez · Cocó Caballero · Coco González Lohse · Elías Santis · Fabio Castro · Fernanda Núñez · Francisco Uzabeaga · Johans Peñaloza · Juana Gómez · Juvenal Barría · Mara Faúndez · Marcela Serra · Marino Balbuena · Mauricio Garrido · Miss Van · Nicola Verlato · Paloma Castillo · Rolankay · Simón Sepúlveda · Ulises Mazzucca · Vicente Prieto Gaggero · Vicente Ruiz · Víctor Castillo · Wladymir Bernechea

"And won't this be 'living':
To be changed by new experiences
that lead to new decisions
and new actions?"

Vilém Flusser (1981)

La Casa por la Ventana invites us to a house party with old and new friends who have a precious relationship with this gallery. From the beginning, the choreographer and cultural manager Isabel Croxatto has proposed to those who have participated in this project to live with art, blurring the boundaries between the space where art is exhibited and the space where art lives. There, in her house, the objects surrounding her have become talking, living materials that transmit experiences, stories and ideas. As Vilém Flusser points out in his lectures on How to Explain Art (1981): "Each type of object in its own way challenges my intention to transcend it in order to reach the other through it. While that other could be an object, allowing a chain of contacts between one object or work of art and the next, I think that, in this case, that other is also another human being, a spectator and visitor. The voices of art objects always seek to meet someone to touch, to move, someone who will allow them to remain in their memory, in their cells, and thus transform their being in the world. From there, art can be understood as a method of knowing and modifying the world (Flusser, 1981), leading us to live culturally permeated by knowledge and forms that constitute our inhabitation and our way of existing and being. When we find ourselves immersed in art, it has the possibility of slipping easily into our most intimate experiences, into our dreams, gestures, desires and thoughts.

The present calls us to recognise that our actions have a much greater reach than what we can see; works of art teach us much of this. In these ten years of existence that we are celebrating today, Isabel Croxatto Galería has found different strategies of control and decontrol that are inherent to the ritual of art. In them, the gallery functions as a kind of performative, choreographic space in which a series of conventions of the visual arts are used to introduce new camouflaged experiences. On this occasion, La Casa por la Ventana proposes the creation of scenic experimentations in real-time, in which the montage of the exhibition allows us to identify and remember those artists who are part of its history and its future, and whose works have inspired different questions about the power of art.

As the writer Joseph Campbell (2017) observes:

"Animal exuberance, this mystery of play, is very close to (if not identical with) the basic impulse of genius in the arts. The power of great art to purge us to release us, for a moment, from the jungle-melancholy of hungering, frightened, or drearily bored mankind- derives from its transcendence of the usual biological emotions."

In other words, this exhibition proposes to open up the question of how artists introduce codes into matter to make it transparent, to show its ontological potential, that which makes it possible to reach the other. Since artistic messages transmit models for the experience of the concrete and affect deep levels of the network (Flusser, 1981), to make a work of art is to interfere directly with the realm of cause and effect; this tells us something very profound about the structure of how things are and how objects transcend us. Since we cannot explain the causality of art, its effects simply behave like a magic spell.

In this sense, the artists who make up this exhibition: Ali Elmacı, Andrea Wolf, Armando de la Garza, Axel Ríos, Bruna Truffa, Carlos Damacio, Carlos Gallardo, Carolina Muñoz, Cecilia Avendaño, Chiachio & Giannone, Claudia Peña, Claudia Vásquez, Cocó Caballero, Coco González Lohse, Elías Santis, Fabio Castro, Fernanda Núñez, Francisco Uzabeaga, Johans Peñaloza, Juana Gómez, Juvenal Barria, Mara Faúndez, Marcela Serra, Marino Balbuena, Mauricio Garrido, Miss Van, Nicola Verlato, Paloma Castillo, Rolankay, Simón Sepúlveda, Ulises Mazzucca, Vicente Prieto Gaggero, Vícente Ruiz, Víctor Castilloand Wladymir Bernechea understand the power of reconciling humanity's inherently aesthetic dimension with its innate creative vocation. In their works, the intention is to signify the world, to mediate between us and such worlds, to shake us up, and to return us to that affective, loving and magical space on which our entangled relationships depend. La Casa por la Ventana is the dance of how we enter the work and how it crosses and inhabits us.