Facundo Argañaraz
Sunday, 20 October 2013
Work from Tonight Tonight at Highlight Gallery.
“’The Thousand and One Nights is not something which has died. It is a book so vast that it is not necessary to have read it, for it is a part of our memory — and also, now, a part of tonight.” – Jorge Luis Borges. The Thousand and One Nights, 1980.‘
As the infinite time of the thousand and one nights continues its course, so does our construction of narrative, lan- guage, art, etc., even outside the rails of the future, and in the plateau of our ever-expanding present— tonight. The exhibition is about itself and the weight of uncountable others— an exhibition within exhibitions, of conjunction over connection, a translation creating a different version.
For “Tonight Tonight” Facundo Argañaraz presents a new series of paintings, photographs, and installations/ sculptures. The works in the exhibition will be mostly comprised of ready-to-use industrial materials such as aluminum panels, acrylic sheets, steel reeling bars and fittings, fluorescent lights, automotive paint, and processes such as screen printing, spray paint and direct to substrate printing.
Argañaraz’s current practice is aimed at confronting, and living within, the conditions of contemporary aesthetics locked into an ever expanding present— laying bare (after the future) the banality and entropic characteristic of Modern constructs, the erosion of content through time, and the problems of originality in a thoroughly commodified world.
Argañaraz’s process consists of exploiting a wide range of mark-making tools (silkscreens, transfers, spray paint, roller pads, etc.), commercial printing techniques, ready-made forms, abstract reverberations from obsolete con- sumer electronics, and found imagery (not for their nostalgic value but as cultural debris, waste, etc.), in order to arrive to and expand possible instruments of abstractions into constructed compositions.” – Highlight Gallery