Jelly Fish

“Let me tell you: I’m trying to seize the fourth
dimension of the instant-now so fleeting that it’s
already gone because it’s already become a new
instant-now that’s also already gone. Every thing has
an instant in which it is. […] I want to possess the
atoms of time. And to capture the present, forbidden
by its very nature: the present slips away and the
instant too, I am this very second forever in the
now.

It is precisely here that Bastos insists that artistic experience takes place within the realm of the visible—or, more broadly, that of sensation, as his sonic and thermal works likewise demonstrate. It isalso constituted by the estrangements, surprises, and paradoxesgenerated by the reflection, attention, and duration that orbitperception. Certain phenomena occur beyond what we are able to see,unsettling the systems through which we ordinarily organize things.When there is too much information, too many singularities, the veryidea of perception as a system collapses. What remains is experience inits unstable form.

It is at this juncture that an Augustinian impulse opens up once again: the aspiration toward a system that exceeds what is given, toward a more intricate reality commensurate with reality itself. Such a reality cannot be fully apprehended through human simplifications; it can only be glimpsed obliquely, when in fact it is operated upon by entities of far greater magnitude—whether, inAugustinian thought, theological and divine ones, or, in particle physics, physical and quantifiable ones. A thing is never merely whatit appears to be in a given instant: it is also the potential sum ofwhat it has been and what it may become, entangled across space, time,and ontology, traversing the ideal and the physical. The present,always uncapturable because it has already passed, thus appears, in itsimmediacy and ephemerality, perhaps more abstract than the past or thefuture themselves. From this condition emerges an axis of symmetry—or, better, an operator of reflection capable of transforming matter into force and force into matter.

Bastos thus finds a point of evidence from which to bring the temporalexperience he proposes into proximity with the concept ofsupersymmetry: a hypothesis in theoretical physics that establishes acorrespondence between particles of different types, extending thesymmetry described by the Standard Model. [5] The idea interests theartist because it suggests a reality in which apparently distinctentities and states may participate in a common structure. Theentanglement of past and future likewise obeys none of therepresentations of Euclidean geometry. The present, in turn, seems toanswer to a nongeometry, to the coexistent and intricate algebraicvarieties of differential geometry. At stake is a way of thinking reality beyond the categories that organize it, making the very attempt to explain it an operation that produces new modes of understanding. Scientific methods, then, in attempting to explain reality, necessarily entail the production of a new reality.

Bastos’s intentions extend in this direction. They seek to bring twoapparently antithetical categories into proximity: matter and dynamics,the static body and the dynamic, incorporeal forces that exist withouta body and act upon elements of undeniable corporeality. We can thusglimpse how the nature of the form we apprehend also derives from theforms of thought through which we categorize and explain it. Weunderstand the world through methods and practices that are necessarilylimited. The habitual reduction of scientific systems to the scale of human cognition, grounded in a Eurocentric, linear, binary, evolutionary, and categorial system, produces its own excess:propositions that exceed conventional hierarchies and structures when these prove insufficient.

The dialogues that compose I See Her, She Saw Me—the exhibition’ssound work—take up this question from another angle, understanding theephemerality of time as the formative condition of memory, alwaysshifting and therefore incomplete, while at the same time exceedinganything already complete. They encounter the Cartesian notion thathuman experience occurs at specific points in time and space, blurringthe pasteurized, desensitized reading of experience by honoring each ofits singularities. Symmetry remains suggested here: the two parts itconnects, like the axis itself, do not, strictly speaking, share thesame ontological status. The differentiation between these states—matters and forces, the now and the not-now, the natural and the artificial—reinforces their intimate proximity without implying a relation of equality. Whereas the events in Apparently Still unfold over an exceedingly brief duration, in Drift Bastos opts for a duration diametrically opposed. Droplets of water, formed through the condensation of humidityin the air, gather at the center of a refrigerated corten-steel plate.The work challenges the viewer from another angle, again putting thevery idea of duration under tension: one must remain before the workfor an extended period to perceive its mechanism. More than decipheringthat mechanism, what matters is that it become fertile ground for theviewer to coexist intimately with the work. In this sense, Bastosenters into dialogue with a tradition of conceptual art that also feedson the accoutrements accompanying the work—its title or technicalspecifications, for instance—which can help an anxious mind unravel theintended workings of each piece. At the same time, he distances himselffrom using these elements as explanatory devices, insisting thatsustained attention, a focus on experience, and the relationestablished between work and viewer are sufficient to complete theartistic experience.
The impulse to propose structures capable of explaining how everythingworks and where everything comes from thus reveals itself asineffective. This way of seeing the world—attempting to apprehend everything, so much, all at once—also results in seeing nothing.

The images that seem to recognize themselves within the paintings are like wise called into question: do they occur at atomic or astronomical scales? Are they images of material bodies as seen, or diagramsdemonstrating their forces? Are they fictional, or so real as todisclose physical systems? The distinction between them—betweenpaintings and nonpaintings, between the microcosmic and the macrocosmic—could hardly matter less. More than symmetry as a tool through whichone knows what will appear on the other side of a point, axis, orplane, Bastos is interested in its capacity to produce opacity, to formunforeseen and incalculable zones beyond the singularity of experience.What interests him is the expansion of material and physicallimitations to the point at which these things come undone—or undo whathas already been made.