Touching with your eyes, seeing with your hands
Táctica Sintáctica
Touching With Your eyes, Seeing With Your Hands
‘I don’t know how to add. All I know how to do is create. Only that.’
Marguerite Duras, No More (1995)
The exhibition Táctica Sintáctica subverts museum rules in order to provide space to the body. Art works are scattered in the rooms, some partly hidden, others can only be viewed when visitors are willing to squat, climb or kneel down. The artist Diego Bianchi takes every opportunity to awaken, surprise and touch the visitors. For this exhibition, he transforms together with the poet and curator Mariano Mayer a selection of art works from the Museo CA2M Collection and the ARCO Foundation Collection (Spain). The selection includes work by David Hockney, Julia Spínola, Bruce Talamon, Dan Flavin, Dora García, Jimmie Durham, Günther Förg, Zoe Leonard, Joachim Koester, and many others. They insert new works and frame them in a new strategy (táctica) of loose ends (sintáctica). By reframing the collections, they also displace the identity and sensuality of the bodies around them. Táctica Sintáctica thus invites visitors to move and play to discover infinite perspectives. The radical question is: what movements and identities are hidden and reflected in art exhibitions? And what does the body want?
Táctica Sintáctica started in 2022 as part of the series Dubbing the Voice of the Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Madrid. In this series, artists are invited to provide new perspectives on the collections. Through disruptions, unforeseen interpretations and new ways of speaking, artists open up collections for new productions. To re-load and design Táctica Sintáctica in Marres marks the second phase of this opening-up process. Here, the exhibition offers not a perspective on an anchored collection but instead a group show unmoored from institutional history and memory.
Diego Bianchi and Mariano Mayer: “It all started as a game. We wanted to build an entire landscape of works within a museum. One composed of heterodox elements, rising high and piled on top of each other, able to serve as a critique of the clinicality and neutrality in which works of art are exhibited. We wanted to take some time to imagine that works were once again things of the world. In doing so, we began to see them as particles circulating, exposed to light or danger. The sensitive bond we re-establish with objects allows us to rediscover our tactility and recollection. To prevent our tactile emotions from becoming a haze that would engulf the works, we needed to release materials that were unfinished, soft, hot, cold, hard, rough. Caressing, massaging, elongating the materials; finding other forms in the repetition, in the touch and feel, in the gestures. Sculptural objects embody a moment in time; they teach us to think with our hands. Our eyes allow us to discover the distance that exists between our body and what we want to touch. They have nothing to do with our visual enjoyment; they merely measure how far from or close to whatever we want to touch we are.”
Táctica Sintáctica is the second in a series of re-loads Marres started in 2020 with the exhibition Codex Subpartum, a new version of an exhibition in which three artists created musical pieces on the basis of the collection of the Sztuki Museum in Lodz, Poland.
Diego Bianchi (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1969) studied graphic design at the University of Buenos Aires and works as a visual artist and teacher since 2003. Among his most noteworthy exhibitions are INFLATION, Liverpool Biennial (2021); Sauvetage Sauvage and Softrealism, Galerie Jocelyn Wolff (Paris, 2020 & 2019); Museo Abandonado: Barrio Kronfus, Bienal Sur 2019 (Argentina); The Enchanting Now, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (2017); WasteAfterWaste, Perez Art Museum (Miami, 2015); Suspensión de la incredulidad, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (2015); Under de Si, in collaboration with Luis Garay (Matadero, Madrid, 2018, Wienner Festwochen, Austria and Bienal de Performance, Buenos Aires, 2015); El trabajo en Exhibición, Galerie Jocelyn Wolff (Paris, 2015); Into the wild meaning, Visual Arts Center (Austin, 2013). His work has also been seen at the 13th Istanbul Biennial (2013); 11th Lyon Biennial (2011) and the 10th Havana Biennial (2009). Since 2009 he has taught in the Artists Program at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and in other institutions giving workshops and symposiums. He has also published books, including Enlarge. Diego Bianchi Works 2003 -2010 (KBB, 2011); RUB. Perspectivas sobre la obra de Diego Bianchi, edited by Inés Katzenstein (Motto, 2018); Diego Bianchi, El presente está encantador (Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, 2019) and Táctica sintáctica (Museo CA2M, 2022). He participated in The Programme of Visual arts Rojas-UBA-Kuitca 2003-2005 (Buenos Aires) and The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (Maine, 2006).
Mariano Mayer (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1971) is a poet and independent curator who has been living in Madrid since 2002. His most recent curatorial projects include Un lento venir viniendo, Cap I . Colección Oxenford(MAC Niterói, Brasil, 2022); Amplitud de contexto with Manuela Moscoso (ARCOmadrid 2023/2022); Tiempo produce pintura – pintura produce tiempo. Álex Marco (Espai d’Art Contemporani, Riba-Roja, 2022); Azucena Vieites. Playing Across Papers (Sala Alcalá 31, Madrid, 2020); En el ejercicio de las cosas, with Sonia Becce (Plataforma Argentina ARCOmadrid 2017); La música es mi casa: Gastón Pérsico (MALBA, Buenos Aires, 2017); Isla de Ediciones (arteBA, Buenos Aires, 2017/2016) and Plano, peso, punto y medida (Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires, 2011). Publications include Fluxus Escrito (Caja Negra, Buenos Aires, 2019); Justus (Diputación de León and Instituto Leonés de Cultura, 2009); Fanta (Corregidor, Buenos Aires, 2002). In 2016 he was Curating Professor of the Artist Programme, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires.
