ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Francisco Vazquez Murillo (Rosario 1980) is a visual artist and a philosophy graduate. His work explores the relationship between body and territory concerning themes of environmental history, politics, and ecology. Intertwining poetic research and landscape production with the cultivation of native Argentinian flora to promote forms of collective and interspecies regeneration.

The ensemble of works by Francisco Vázquez Murillo gathered in the exhibition "The Noise of Machines" has nothing noisy or mechanical. On the contrary, its own order - resulting from the soft color of the eucalyptus wood panels, the forms of undulating and harmonic silhouettes carved on them, their tactile quality, and the repetition of a format whose scale resonates with us because it is human - infuses the environment with warmth, lightness, and a desire for silence. The artworks invite you to an introspective journey, into the interior of the surfaces and into a process that, even though was guided by that noise and those machines mentioned in the title, because of their shrillness and vertigo, sought in them a way to travel adrift and somewhat blindly, towards the encounter of forms and symbols that reveal themselves when we inhabit the darkness of the forest, when we glimpse its cadence from afar or penetrate the wood. When we allow ourselves to be guided by intuition - which is so inherent to us - of writing.

This journey that the artist undertakes both above the surface and through it, seeks to discover that which simmers, that which boils because it is alive on Earth. That which lies hidden within, that sometimes so tamed interior and which only the act of doing and walking has the capacity to reveal.

Alejandra Aguado

Alejandra Aguado (Buenos Aires, 1976) is a curator and Head of Heritage at the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires.

THE NOISE OF MACHINES (Gallery text)

Francisco Vázquez Murillo’s images seduce us with their familiarity, with that intimacy resulting from the encounter with something we know it’s not alien although we haven’t seen it before, asserted through our eyes and skin, revealing that there is something in common; there are codes traveling through time, matter, space. They seem to have been hiding in his retinae. They emerge from his observing, at lost, the roofs of his wooden house, from arranging seeds, from holding roots in his hands, burying them in the ground, studying the shapes of plants and recording how they are altered by changes in the environment. From watching bugs crawling and making furrows in the grass and in the house; from looking at the trail of his way of walking, feeling vertigo, hot and cold.

Francisco’s images are an echo of his obsession with studying alphabets, of his tendency towards writing and building —which are, in fact, a single entity. They are the outcome of aligning, piling, setting, and finding, in these new orders, senses. Of forgetting about the difference between reality and fiction and plunging into producing these images as if they were channels to reverse the belief that there are strange forms, because strangeness is just a mirage made of distance.

In the few millimeters —the single millimeter?— the tool with which Francisco carved the surface of his wooden boards —his paintings, those barks— moved forward, he appropriated shapes that seem to have been waiting to be found. They have the strength of that which does away with what’s accessory or artificial: there’s no disguise or illusion in his images, but weathering and erosion. They are light gainst a darkness in which pre-existing and timeless shapes come back to life. In those underlying, fertile shapes-organisms-scars-signs, the beginning of life itself beats. Its stillness is a fantasy because we know they vibrate. Francisco Vázquez Murillo’s images, though being an expression of our ability to create signs and language, are older than Babel. The possibility of giving a thousand names to a flower and calling them mal de ojos, algarrobillo, piscala, cosme, flor de indio, barbón, picha de perro, poinciana or espiga de amor —data with which his work is reinforced— is a retracing so that all of us can speak the same form, recognize the same behavior. His images move across historical time and eographic-cultural distance. They may be telling us that we should pay attention to that which hasn’t been yet categorized, named, worded. Images in this state of purity are supportive.

Francisco Vázquez Murillo’s images emerge from “looking up, looking down”, as the artist himself observes. From looking from afar and from a short distance, from inside and outside. The zenithal view of the forest, whose cadence is similar to that of the sea bottom —maybe that which Francisco calls “the noise of thought”—, suggests we find depth and surface. The artist’s journey over the skin of the forest as well as through it seeks to uncover that which is bubbling, boiling, because it’s active on Earth.

Hypnotic, Vázquez Murillo’s images adjust something in our eyes, entice touch, let us float. Between rite and exercise, they represent the energy existing inside a furnace or the primordial soup when it comes as well as when it escapes or is transformed.

Alejandra Aguado