Tirco Matute / False Misstep
October 12 — November 24, 2023
Casa Proyecto
Carlos Calvo 357, C1102 CABA
Buenos Aires, Argentina
photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Casa Proyecto, Buenos
Aires, Argentina
A 4-meter-long steel cane welcomes the viewer into what appears to be a two-room house
illuminated like the rooms of an art gallery. In this play of roles and overlapping intentions,
the artist Tirco Matute is not innocent of every decision made for the exhibition that he has
titled False Misstep, inaugurated at the Casa Proyecto gallery in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
The steel object, of cold materiality, is known to any visitor to the exhibition as one of those
handrails that abound in the places we pass through within the city and that in this case has
a text inscribed in Braille that would supposedly enunciate the phrase : “Qué nos ha traído
Dios”, being one of the many possible translations into Spanish from Old English (“What has
God wrought?”); and which was the language that gave rise to the first phrase sent from a
telegraph in Morse code from Washington to Baltimore, crossing the North American country
from west to east on May 24, 1844.
The room, divided in the middle by the object, presents a series of pieces as a conceptual
photographic essay for the study of light and the phenomena of representation that involve
images along with a panoply of visual signs that usually accompany them; be it: its device,
its context or its enunciation. These apprehended codes are declassified and resignified
through the objects that house these photographs, in turn incorporated in such a way as to
be an intrinsic part of the same piece and not a frame that delimits them. Returning to Morse
code and Braille, both binary systems and designs for reading and writing, it would appear
that the equation of background and figure is diluted in these works hanging on the wall,
where the image does not allow a limitation as a support and structure, but rather as an
assembly, and set of a totality and/or unity of metaphor and rhetoric.
The sound of a television that would seem to have been left on resonates from the second
room, dark and a little more suffocating, its walls framing the completely dark register of itself
and that the artist has installed as a site specific ( the mind criticizes (non-critical), deciding
to rotate the photographic representation of the room on its own axis and in which the
silhouettes of the vertices of the space and the elements that compose it appear like ghosts;
like its window and the entrance door. This large background is the material support, which
at the same time following the linearity of one of the walls of the room of that other virtual
space represented, exhibits a series of textual drawings printed with inkjet on absorbent
paper napkins with different patterns and motives that suggest simulating a concrete poetry
with phrases that refer to the different readings and conceptions that can be attributed to the
images and their condition as a representation of the everyday world, with the strength of
their statements and the fragility of their support. However, concrete poetry specifically
designed each interlude, void or rest that its prose required. That decision, here, would seem
to be resigned to the manufactured and industrialized design of the different brands that
produce rolls of kitchen napkins, generating a dialogue between random and arbitrary, at the
same time we notice the control of the situation in the making of these pieces so that the
textual drawing fits with the greatest possible precision between the embossing of the paper.
It could be thought that there is a kind of post-truth in the final reading of the installation, like
a semantic game in the strategy used in the execution of neurolinguistic practice, but
indicated from the version of its pseudo-science: neurolinguistic programming. Inhabit an
everyday space that has become an other place, move from its axes the centrality of the
sign to be enunciated, disguise the walls with the shadow of their own folds and recreate the
abyss as a glow of the end of time.