Opening: Thursday November 16th 6pm
In the middle of the 20th century, Argentina saw the publication of the first guides on astronomical photography. These were technical manuals catering to an amateur audience. With straightforward cameras and easily constructed instruments, enthusiasts were able to capture well-defined images of the Milky Way. These manuals, besides achieving relative success, facilitated the unprecedented merging of two dimensions: the distant and intangible outer space with the familiar and ordinary aspects of everyday objects.
Nicolás Bacal's interest lies in this union. His poetics focus on the crossover between immensity and smallness, the earthly and the celestial. Departing from the popularisation of science as a literary genre, Bacal traces operations that contrast the conceptual hardness of the topic with the plastic fragility of the material. In his work, contrast and metaphor converge to become visual experiments of a precise nature. Midnight brings together two pieces about the sky and the Earth. The displayed photographs replicate the configuration of stars and nebulae in the Milky Way using everyday objects. Each image corresponds to a section of the galactic plane, capturing the focused stars of a constellation while the surrounding undefined objects allude to cosmic dust. This transformation elevates the ordinary to the celestial, revealing a cosmology of disorder.
In turn, a set of thirty-six solid wooden benches, adorned with embedded objects, highlights the constellations of the northern hemisphere. Each functional bench features a carved constellation on its base. While the arrangement of the legs contributes to the drawing of the constellation, the embedded objects serve as comments on existing mythologies, as vanishing points or starting points for new visions.
Midnight presents itself as a partial representation. Neither is the galactic plane complete, nor are the eighty-eight constellations that make up the celestial sphere present in this hall. Indeed, from the human experience, it is not possible to witness the entirety of the sky. In this sense, Midnight serves as a counterpoint: while it is night in one hemisphere, there is another where it is day. It is worth pondering, then, from the basement of this neoclassical French palace, how to go about discovering that remaining side.
Francisco Medail
