Introduction

The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey presents the first solo exhibition of artist Tomás Saraceno (Argentina, 1973) in Latin America. His work blurs the line between art scientifc thought and different creative processes, creating pieces that show incredible technical refinement and sensibility. Saraceno uses the expertise of specialists in different fields in order to create magical surroundings that alternate between the construction of impossible spaces, references to the nature of the cosmos, molecular biology and the laws of physics.

The origin of the cosmos has always intrigued Tomás Saraceno, who explores radical ideas, such as the existence of parallel universes. His interest in these themes is indebted to a certain domain of artistic exploration to which some creators have made recourse throughout history. These artists have allowed themselves to draw nourishment from information that is foreign to the traditional frame of the arts in order to interpret, or reinterpret, the world.

In Saraceno’s case, many projects draw inspiration from astronomy and astrophysics. Saraceno and his studio produce ideas from a multi-disciplinary platform, an approach that has, over the years, suggested possible realities that often verge on utopia.

The theory serves both researchers and Saraceno as an illustration of the codependent relationship that exists in our planet. lt posits that any isolated incident has consequences for the totality. One obvious case of this would of course be climate change.

Drawing on physics and mathematics, for example, Saraceno has taken the referent of the so-called “Membrane Theory,” an emerging area of research that involves studies of gravity in a multidimensional context in order to explain the essential forces of nature. This model of study is represented as a plane that, through pressure at a point on its surface, acquires a curvature that affects everything else on it.By drawing on these scientific theories, Saraceno lays the foundation for critical, poetic and even political visions, and invites everybody to contribute to the creation of possible futures. Artistic ideas work as invitations to take different yet horizontal roles in the construction of a better future.

The value of this kind of project is rooted in the pressing need to posit a more conscious transformation as a society, one in which we would learn to anticipate problems and to shape how we really want to live. lt is easy to interpret artistic projects like this as utopias, but for Saraceno, by contrast, they constitute the opportunity to make ideas concrete and to bring them about.

The artist does not delegate that responsibility to third parties, and becomes an agent of social change with his cooperative projects. He breaks down the barriers of incredulousness and achieves things previously believed to be impossible. In most cases, his work evokes situations that seem to come from dreams; it is so ethereal, so precise in its artistic realizations that it verges on the oneiric.

As a matter of principle he does not establish a hierarchical structure within his incredibly well designed working teams. In this sense Saraceno’s installations are not scale models, but rather apparatuses for creating experiences and for confronting that which we do not know or understand. The horizon that separates reality from utopia is much less enigmatic to him than it is to the rest of us.