Azoic

The new exhibition by Cristián Salineros F. is an invitation to think about the current state of the Earth. The title refers to the Azoic Age, the first geological period: a time before the appearance of the first forms of life where high temperatures and a lack of oxygen in the atmosphere characterized the planet. The artist invokes that early era as if he were trying to capture the ghostly echoes of a period that has left no fossil remains. At a time when the planet begins to cross a climatic point of no return, Salineros reflects on what it is that makes the formation and persistence of life possible.

Displayed throughout the museum, Azoico is also a cartography of the interests, obsessions, and desires that mobilize the artist's recent work. The intersections between organic and inorganic worlds, social surveillance, the tensions between nature and technology, the politics of space, the promises of modernity, and the anthropocentric fantasies of colonizing outer space make recurrent appearances in his sculptures and installations. Utilizing multiple scales and materials - from galvanized steel to bird food, from animal bones to clay - the works remind us of complex, interconnected systems.

Each work has an atmosphere. As we move between one and the other, our body questions its place in that scenario. Some sculptures evoke ways humans blur their edges to become animal or plant forms.

Others, however, carry a deep melancholy in the face of an irreparable loss that is difficult to name. Salineros's exhibition is an invitation to slow down. Nevertheless, it also recognizes that for the territory that will survive us - for the memory of geological cycles - to go backward or forward always takes us to the same place.

Text by Miguel A. López (curator of the exhibition)