Glimmer

…to find, beyond all the technical activity that weighs down today’s human masses, that irrepressible element thanks to which man can only perfectly resemble a star. Georges Bataille.

Glimmer proposes to vindicate the imperceptible hemorrhage designated by “the principle of the spirit.” It confirms a will to exalt intimate certainties of our life experience based on knowledge that constitutes itself as vision. This exhibition undoubtedly goes against the grain of the inclinations toward intellectualization currently in fashion, and congratulates itself for it. Glimmer is an attempt to remind us that artistic gestures still hang onto that powerful, ancient specificity: a practice of knowledge acquirable in immanence, the latent tangentiality of what the mystics called revelation.

Many of these works confirm that—above all—the experience of art deals with gaining access to a contagion with what remains unsaid, to penetrate the defect of its mute revelation as a vision of language, by way of its successive veils. It is not in the symbol, nor in interpretation nor in an exaltation of motive, it is not in history. The vision in art implies participation in a presence that secretes its own gnosis, and gives away—as language; ecstatic—the eloquence of the veiled to our most subtle physiology.

As such, Glimmer aspires to enjoy itself like an imperfect liturgy on the “old” domains of fragility and intimacy; it seeks to defend the inheritance of this gift for our times. The works brought together here speak of the emergence of human consciousness and of its gestures of spiritual or psychic resurrection. Some pieces achieve articulating small stories, creating communities from their potential for resistance. Not all manage to transcend their life arguments; however, they do confirm a temporality in their desire and death drives. And that temporality would seem to proclaim the utopian destiny of our species. To be immortal and then die.

Glimmer reclaims the ties between art and spirituality, art and ethics, art and human nature. Its pieces exemplify a desire to name and praise the intimate certainties of our daily lives.

Glimmer
Kurator: Osvaldo Sanchez

Künstler: Louise Bourgeois, Francis Alÿs, Cy Twombly, Bas Jan Ader, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Jim Hodges, Cerith Wyn Evans, Wolfgang Tillmans, Ann Hamilton, Andres Carretero, Hreinn Fridfinnsson, Ana Mendieta, Douglas Gordon, Thomas Glassford, Salla Tykkä, Knut Asdam, Arturo Herrera ...