Texts (English/Spanish/French) by Sebastián Díaz Morales, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Malena Souto, interview between the artist and Mathilde Roman
Design: Roosje Klap
Publisher: BOM DIA BOOKS, Germany 176 p 267 x 240 mm
ISBN 978-3-943514-85-8
This book is published on the occasion of the exhibition Ficcionario IV, Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen and the Biennale di Venezia, 57th International Art Exhibition, 2017, VIVA ARTE VIVA.
Supported by the Mondriaan Foundation and Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen.
Sebastián Díaz Morales was born in 1975 in the Argentine city of Comodoro Rivadavia. His pictorial language bears the mark of this “Capital of the Wind”, as it is called, situated in an isolated spot between the Atlantic Ocean and the Patagonian Desert. As Morales himself says, the experience of growing up in an extreme environment in the middle of nowhere led to a particular way of perceiving reality.
His films and videos, which he has been producing since 1995, show that reality is nothing more than a figment of the imagination. Every figure and every narrative in them is a metaphor for the boundary between reality and fiction. His films revolve around the suspension of time and the displacement of space and time through the constant dreaming and reconstruction of reality.
In the trilogy of videos portraited in this book, Insight, Suspension and The Lost Object, the artist invites us to suspend ourselves in a dream-like scenario dominated by lighting effects. We do not enter a dark room but an atmosphere subject to the different beams of light shining all around us. That is the point, to throw light on the unknown, or on what we take for granted as natural when in fact it is nothing more than an impoverished fallacy. Or maybe it is simply about shining a light on ourselves as subjects and returning to the true essence of things: beauty, surprise, novelty and illusion.