César Martinez
Transitory Present
Asphyxiation, or the fits of the politicised lung.
The energy we need for our survival comes from the chemical reactions found in biological oxidation. This is an enzymatic process through which the metabolizing of carbohydrates, fatty acids, and amino acids occurs. The by-products of this process are carbon dioxide and water. Biologically useful energy is preserved. Air is the soul of emotions. It is the body of the soul. The unsubstantial matter of life. The basic transfer of hydrogen atoms from donors to receivers.
The asphyxiating quality of air doesn’t operate slowly in this new millennium, and our skilled and educated emotions contract themselves abnormally at an alarming pace: we are inside a potential ‘bronchial tube’, inside big trouble! Politicised carbon dioxide and the oxygen added tax have made life drowsy and also to go astray. The degree of this change has been such, that the respiratory tract has been mistaken for awful main streets in the most populated anxie-cities in the World. The force generated by the purity of air is now in danger, and at the end of the day, we are waiting for the bio-energetic possibility that goes beyond the political and economic interests which the dead fuel (the antediluvian or fossil fuel) has produced century after century, and also by the signs of the signs.
This fossil fuel which is turning each one of us into something akin to a living fossil. This fuel lets us know that our emotional quotient or intele-affectivity is in need of something new that will allow us to live less deflated.
From metabolism to metaphor:
In what we call daily life, or sudden metaphysics, the mechanical process through which air passes into the lungs when we need it comes to our attention. Or when the amount of air we breathe provides costs: first the quality breathable and visible of polluting particles and their high biological cost; and second the amount of money spent in each millilitres of gas produced by combustion. Millions of dollars and millions of pains. Quality and quantity. Simultaneously. We realize that we don’t realize this situation. We don’t realize that air disappears because we don’t see it, and yet we can feel when it’s not there. Oh, dear, it’s frightening!
Air is so important that it is considered the matter that sustains life. It is also the breath that reduces and expands us. Nitrogen and oxygen; life’s equation. This is where my interest in inflatable sculptures, soft sculptures, blown sculptures, comes from.
Experimenting with a change of volume, I present this inflatable sculptures as elements that polarize balance, as real solutions that don’t have a practical use, and as something that becomes important because of its absence. I try to regard them as a breath; considering breath as the hope of liberating oneself from this materialist, corporeal coffin we are in. Beyond the limits imposed by Nature’s laws: in a breath, in an event. Life is that: a breath. The breath of life or the breath of God, if God exists. Daily life becomes a perpetual transformation.
To defy the sculpture’s gravity, it’s strength; it’s angles until they become disoriented. To transform it’s appearance from hard to soft, and to verify it’s unrecognisable transformation are other motifs I explore in this form of liberating air from it’s own material confinement. To traverse the Anatomy, Biology, time and reason of these sculpted bodies or life. Between stone and air there is a clear and heavy difference: something permanent and something volatile.
If we watch how the diaphragm’s movements that happen in our body or girth of life, not only produce changes in our thorax, in us the aerobic beings, but also permit instants to expand; and in this sculptural case, instants are retarded and expanded during a 30 seconds time lapse.
The body as a semiotic metamorphosis o the insufferable brevity of being.
The different politicised values of life’s sense produce contractile impulses in our social oxygen.
Human lungs,
Naked, swinging like tires.
Idealized body
Body breath
Body whisper
Body sigh
Body eco
Politicised territory
Oppressed and punished…
And in this chronicle of a panic foretold, on the sidewalk of our responsibilities we are vulnerable, our alveolus are underestimated, our aerial sacs undervalued, and our epithelium completely surrounded by a conceptual coating, and because of that, I say goodbye with a sigh.
The length of the word “brevity”, the concept it represents, it’s fundamental substance, its chemical reaction inside us is briefer than the time we spend pronouncing this word.