Opening November 16th 6.30 pm
Visits: Tuesday to Sunday from 12:30 pm to 8 pm. Without reservation. Damián Linossi revisits the architecture of the Morris columns, devices from the mid-19th century used in Europe to centralise street advertising and prevent posters from becoming spread around the cities. The columns were the means to promote theatre and cinema and became popular in the West until they fell into disuse and became urban ruins or monuments of a visual culture in decline vis-à-vis the rise of mass media in the twentieth century. This public exhibition device becomes here a resource for the artist's pictorial production, a sort of individual gallery space. The poster - precarious, perishable, and volatile - is replaced by overlapping layers of oil paintings designed, paradoxically, to outlive the artist and be preserved. Here, in contrast, they are brought out into the public arena by means of a device that renders them fragile by ignoring the well-known "do not touch" imperative sign that defines transit in exhibitions. The works are symbolically abandoned by their creator to be left at the mercy of passers-by and their wishes under the implicit permission to take them away, alter or even vandalise them. In these times of wide-ranging questioning of the prevailing socio-economic system, this work discusses the visual culture that corresponds to such a system and raises questions about the role of the image and art in the public realm, as well as notions of intellectual and material property. Liliana Piñeiro
Photograph: Damián Linossi
