By Kate Mothes
“Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being,” philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre posited in Being and Nothingness, published in 1943. It’s in this book that he also shares an anecdote about stepping into a cafe, where he was to meet a friend. In scanning the room with its other patrons, furniture, and noise, he was tuned into the fact that his friend was not there, an experience infused with an acute awareness—an absence that transformed into a kind of presence.
Architects of Absence, a group exhibition at Gallery Wendi Norris, plumbs this dialogue between two seemingly contradictory elements. Colossal readers may recognize the work of Dabin Ahn, Selva Aparicio, and Remedios Varo (1908-1963) alongside Marcel Jean (1900-1993) and Yaxkin Fuentes-Barrientos. Aparicio is currently artist-in-residence at the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Martin House in Buffalo, New York, where she sources disused clay roof tiles on which she then carved fallen leaves.
Through surreal compositions in a variety of media, including Fuentes-Barrientos’ architectural graphite drawings and oil paintings and Ahn’s dreamy meditations on loss and the passage of time, viewers are invited to reflect upon the nature of not only presence in a physical sense but also the emotional and psychological sense of being present. Silhouettes, cutouts, buildings and sky, and light and shadow assemble into symbolic motifs of remembrance and visibility.
The gallery says, “Whether investigating the psychic, mythic, and alchemical realms of the imagination, documenting the material remnants of industrial and biological change, or harnessing loss and memory into resonant forms, their works map the absences that define reality.
Architects of Absence continues through August 29 in San Francisco.
