Galleries in Paris

The flow of the stream carries the water to the lake

The exhibition at Level One brings together the work of Pablo Accinelli (1983) and Nicolás Bacal (1985), both natives of Buenos Aires. Invited to collaborate for the first time in the context of this exhibition, the display seeks to uncover their shared sensibility while highlighting the heterogeneity of their methods. Taking everyday life as their playground, both artists envision their work as a diverse collection of devices designed to convey a sensitive experience of the world around us.
Marked with poetic inspiration and selected by the artists, the title of the exhibition describes a rather basic phenomenon that is, after all, relatively concrete and ordinary. Stating the obvious, the assertion intends to describe a natural event much more than explaining it. In hydrography, a stream is a body of water that gravity causes to flow into a river or lake. It is this same gravitational force, responsible for the oceans’ tides, which explains the Earth’s gravitational pull as well as the movement of stars and planets.
In Nicolás Bacal’s work, the gravity binding together earth and moon is as intense as the attraction between two bodies. Like in a sugary pop song, his works display a series of universal emotions – love, longing, nostalgia – which, while not necessarily autobiographical, comprise an affective appeal used to trigger a heightened intimacy with the artwork. Trained as a musician, Bacal unfolds a body of work that explores the passing of time, its rhythm as well as its subjective pace. The work often echoes a preadolescent domestic universe filled with references rooted in pop culture. Bacal’s low tech installations frequently adopt a DIY aesthetic and can be viewed as voluntarily unspectacular, technically simple and nonetheless fully efficient. Thus in ‘Sin titulo’ (2010) Bacal uses everyday materials including an eraser, some string, a balloon, and a fan to recreate a mini planetary model, just like in a science class assignment. While the launch into orbit of his eraser may be magical, the artist does not attempt to conceal how it functions. As is often the case, he exposes the mechanism, encouraging the viewer to look closer, as if to eliminate any separation, thereby creating a kind of intimacy.
In a vein similar to Bruce Nauman’s studio exercises, the video ‘El paso del tiempo’ (2007) shows Bacal recording himself holding a watch while he walks in his room, as if he were circumnavigating his bed. Having previously removed the hour and minute hands, the artist moves across the space at a pace of one step per second, so as to perfectly synchronize his movement with the passing of time. As such, the title of the piece plays with the multiple meanings of the word “paso”, meaning both footstep and passing. The desire to mark time at the same rate as the hands of a clock is a persistent fantasy of the artist, who often tries in vain to slow his heart rate to one beat per second like Master Zacharius, the famous clockmaker in the short story by Jules Verne (‘Maître Zacharius ou l’horloger qui avait perdu son âme’, 1854). The same idea permeates ‘La medida de me tiempo’ (2012) where Bacal replaces the motor of a drill with another device turning at one rotation per minute, which gently, yet just as efficiently drills a hole through the wall of the exhibition.
From Nicolás Bacal’s walk to measure his room in ‘El paso del tiempo’ (2007) to the involuntary choreography of urban feet recorded by Pablo Accinelli in ‘Pies’ (2013), the artists directly appeal to the viewers’ perception of their own movement and environment—both within the gallery as well as through the window which, like a screen, displays a view on the passersby outside.  It seems as if each artist is ultimately examining our own power of observation. With ‘Sin título’ (2013), the blank sheet music by Bacal tests our vision with miniscule chromatic changes, ultimately revealing a subtle range of colors going from red to purple. Meanwhile, Accinelli’s ‘Higrómetro’ (2013) stands as an “organic” re-examination of minimalist sculpture with its stacks made from sheets of paper placed between aluminum structures that react to temperature variations. Speaking of their work, the artists assert: “We work with psychic moments that produce sensitivity.” As the philosopher Emanuele Coccia explains in ‘La Vie sensible’, 2010, things become perceptible through the sensitive and it is from this intermediary space between subject and object that we can shape reality.

An exhibition proposal by Florencia Chernajovsky

(1) Phrase used by Argentine essayist and poet Aldo Pellegrini in 1964 to describe the geometric abstraction of Alejandro Puente.  “While Sol LeWitt painted in white, I applied color with a brush, leaving a certain tactile and emotional texture,” he explained.

(2) Excerpt from “This Great and Wide Sea: An Introduction to Oceanography and Marine Biology,” (1947) by Robert Ervin Coker.

(3) For Vigo, “signaling actions” (señalamiento in Spanish) of everyday objects in their urban context elicits a new perception of the ordinary.