Martín Bonadeo
Pabellón de las Bellas Artes UCA, Buenos Aires
Martín Bonadeo’s (Buenos Aires, 1975) exhibition El cielo en la tierra reflects an eager mind, passionate about the possibilities of technology. Art and science share the search for and the pleasure of creativity, and the discovery of the imperceptible. The Fine Art Pavilion of the Catholic University of Argentina (UCA) created in 2003, after the recycling of the early 20th century harbor docks in Puerto Madero provide the setting for the conversation between a series of devices that “propose poetics regarding the heaven/earth thesis/antithesis”, according to the artist.
The visual repertory that the artist presents includes advertisements and maps, photographs and slides, measurement and orientation instruments, traps for the eye. “You are in heaven,” reads a phrase on the traffic signal billboards and the blue and white plans that open the tour of this confrontation between illusion and reality. The show develops amid metaphorical readings and symbolic reconstructions linked to the outer space, from the planet Earth. Do the magnetic fields of dozens of compasses that stand in one another’s way, glued onto wooden boards and displayed in Buenos Aires, symbolize the deplorable state of the world?
Bonadeo exhibits three series of photographs in which phantasmagoric mists blurr the silhouettes of the buildings and persist in broadening the horizon, images in which one may observe sequences of manipulated satellite photographs and photographs in light boxes. Three slide projectors draw different nocturnal versions of the protective sky, while three sand clocks design unexpected horizons, which also manifest themselves through different perspectives in two sculptures made from thermometers. The installation El color del cielo, featuring color samples strips modified by small lenses, highlights the names of paint colors that allude to heaven. Heaven and Earth, so close and so far, meet and confront one another in a show that does not need discursive explanations to be valued.
