Eduardo Basualdo

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1977

            Eduardo Basualdo's work traces a philosophical territory where his creations operate. His artistic journey of almost twenty years of production has led him to exhibit in various biennials around the world, such as in Venice, Korea, France, Brazil, Spain, and Mexico. Through the use of drawings, objects, sculptures and monumental installations, his works instill the feeling that the world is a fragile and threatening place. The awareness of one's own limits, the profound certainty of an existential loneliness and the danger of contingency and chance, articulate a poetics that places the viewer's experience at the center. 

            As a participant of the famous Kuitca Fellowship, among others, Basualdo works with devices that move, crawl, turn, hang; motorized and luminous, with sharp artifacts or large volumes of black aluminum, his works interact with the shapes of the space in which they are placed and generate acute and dynamic architectures that visitors must pass through. His work Teoría - La cabeza de Goliat, exhibited in 2014 at the Palais de Tokyio in Paris, was an enormous sculpture that hung over the spectators, forcing, like many of his pieces, a form of uncomfortable reception, which avoids passivity, contemplation and explanation, to point to a non-rational dimension, where tense atmospheres, instinctive reactions and driving responses rule. 

            In tune with this perspective, the morphology of his production reveals a mixture of rusticity and formal sharpness, a certain premeditated use of an imaginary between the primitive and the surgical. It allows us to reflect on his works through the idea of the monstrous. The volumes and drawings that populate his work question the ways in which a body is made, what constitutes it and what it hides, but also what gives it life. Light and movement appear as means of minimal vitalization, which not only endow the pieces with locomotion and luminescence, but also give them a strange language, shaped by the slight but persistent sound of the engines that animate them. Thus, Basualdo's production contains its own narrative and its own theatricality: his exhibitions can be conceived as borderline scenes, where the ordinary and the ominous mingle, where the volumes reach a human threshold that allows us to imagine them moving, giving birth, feeding, defending themselves, agonizing.