THE EPHEMERAL IN THINGS - MARTINA SERVIO OLAVIDE IN 1+1

In the midst of her immense workshop, filled with pieces, materials and a three-piece armchair against a window with a view almost more captivating than the countless paintings that occupy the space, Martina Servio Olavide prepares for what she considers, less than a month away from being a mother, the birth to her second "child". The Ephemeral in Things is the result of a joint work process between the artist and Agustina Rinaldi, her curator, which took almost nine months, like one gestation period after the other. And it’s no wonder, since the exhibition will display over a hundred pieces, including mostly paintings, but also prints, video performances, sculptures, installations, and even a book, which in the context of The Ephemeral works as a point of entry and connection to the exhibit and what can be seen inside it.

For the artist, the loss of almost all of her work in a fire was also part of the impulse that made her embark on this process with Rinaldi, turning the production of her work into a combination of careful ritual and intentional inertia, keeping herself in a constant state of creation, in which the process never ceases to be alive. This process may have a beginning, but its end is far from being the instance of exhibition; for Servio Olavide, the pieces are never quite finished, being rather a living part of the work in progress that is her creative process.

It is in this profound uncertainty that, far from feeling intimidated, the artist is able to conceive her work. This can be seen in her relationship with the way she works: the idea is to produce, to experiment, and between variation after variation after variation of a theme, an object, a technique, reveal the small differences or hidden details that can only be expressed through that piece, far from words, or perhaps so intrinsically linked to them that they become a part of the same thing.

It’s there, through her book, "The Search for the Infinite by the Slaves of Frustration", that, Servio Olavide seeks to use the word as a point of reference to something else, between the everyday and the philosophical, implementing her own logic to signifiers and meanings, pulling them apart or together in relation to one another, sometimes changing the former to assign another space to the latter. In this search we also find her relationship to motherhood, which shows up in her work years before her own pregnancy. It is a gesture perhaps somewhere between prophetic and inevitable, especially for someone who lives her life creating, and where everything relates to everything, a Moebius strip without predefined limits.

Thus, among these pieces, as disparate as dozens of large paintings, hundreds of small ceramic pieces and countless variations of the same engraving can be, the artist invites us to understand her world. This world is grounded on an unstable terrain that she constantly travels, the only one in which she feels comfortable, because it forces her to move forward and never stand still. Her work constitutes an attempt to communicate that feeling of constant movement, in which time is nothing more than that which exists between one movement and the next, always uncertain, but strangely comfortable.

The Ephemeral of Things can be visited from Thursday, November 24 at Espacio 1+1 (Darwin 1357, CABA).