about art & science

Art and science have been contiguous trades, almost siblings, with different expressive vehicles but with the same questioning factory.

Their similarities don’t end in being ways of exploring the world, of navigating and questioning it. They also create a space, an area, that is almost defining of our childhoods. We all have been little artists and scientists without wondering where the border was. This isn’t just a metaphor about a curious sailor revealing the unknown, about those that intervene by breaking, arming, disarming. It points to a deeper analogy about the method of discovering and questioning. Establishing theories and conjectures that are forged and undone with actions. The rock throwing boy we once were identifies regularities to create a model on gravity and build their first blueprints on how the universe works. The one who paints, builds, models, draws, dyes colors, explores a universe perhaps even greater: that of the limits, the rules and the forms of what we see, what we represent and what we imagine.

In my own path in life, science and art have met in a process of experimentation, research, in a repertoire of questions, but not where it is usually placed, in a space of technological fanfare. Our work is, in fact, of an extraordinary material simplicity: sometimes paper cutouts or a story whispered in the ear.

Art, like science, is a social adventure. For me, it has been a story of friendship. With Mariano Sardón, my namesake, with whom I have walked side by side for a decade, and learned the freedom that art offers in this space of questions, a freedom with different contours. Science and art have to meet in a space, not just in an intention. And no matter how much this space is uttered, it usually does not exist as such. With Mariano, we solved this in a parsimonious way, replicating old formulas. Our work was developed in a cafe. Not in a laboratory, nor in an atelier, nor in a workshop, nor in any place in which one was, even in a miniscule way, a foreigner. So it all started as a genuine, friendly, compulsive dialogue. One day, in our usual cafe, after several years of sustained conversations that did not materialize, I expressed to Mariano my desire to get my hands dirty and to generate tangible objects. I remember it almost as when Professor Miyagi looked at Daniel San after sanding walls. Everything was already there. Almost without knowing how, paintings, tools, welds, fabrics, galleries, museums followed one another. The work traveled almost by its own volition to Mexico, to Austria, to the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, and from there to the Fortuny Palace at the Venice Biennale, to galleries in Verona, Madrid and it keeps traveling the world with its questions. But the truth is that the work had already taken shape in the drawings of a notebook that testified to the conversations in a honest, free, agnostic, tolerant, bustling, lively zone. At the edge of a cafe table.

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