Intangible Space

A haptic exploration

For, if it be not body, nothing can touch and be touched.”

Lucretius. De Rerum Natura. Canto I

The current global and digital era is characterized by a saturation of imagery that privileges sight as the sense

fundamental to our perception. Ever since Plato’s allegory of the cave, our culture has privileged optics as a

reliable source of knowledge: visual perception is what has always conveyed the material nature of things.

Hence, the concept of the haptic, introduced in the 19th century by art historian Aloïs Riegl, led to a perceptive

twist. The haptic offers another way of seeing, an alternative aesthetic value that visually invokes our sense

of touch.

This exhibition was born out of a desire to experience a form of sensorial perception beyond all things visual.

Here, we find an evident predisposition toward matter, or texture, as the fruit of a corporeal movement that

likewise, can be appreciated in the stillness of each moment reflected in these works.

Intangible Space has been conceived as a sole unit of matter in which the haptic quality of the works provides

a conceptual framework that appeals in different ways to texture and the tactile, thus privileging at a distance

the physical proximity imposed by vision.

In this sense, the haptic condition is displayed from different perspectives. For example, contact between the

human body and the canvas is the basis of the artistic proposal of Donna Huanca and Pamela Rosenkranz,

in whose works skin is not a superficial limit, but rather the transformative element of a canvas that is, in turn,

transformed.

Synesthesia of the visual and the tactile is also especially present in works by Perla Krauze, Cynthia

Gutiérrez, Paloma Bosqué, Olga de Amaral, Jorge Eduardo Eielson, and Jason Martin. In their oeuvre, sight

anticipates a certain texture that we are able to comprehend even without being touched; its cultural condition

seeming to invoke our sensorial memory.

Other artists employ movement, either subtle or brusque, as a ritual in their artistic creation. Such is the case

of Gabriel Orozco, Liat Yossifor, Lucio Fontana, and Matt Ager. Whereas references to movement parting

from muscular position and the capacity to feel that position relative to parts of the body is reflected in the

works of Eva Kotatkova, which allude moreover to the experience of space and the sensation, also haptic, of

corporeal balance and rest by emphasizing gazes, gestures, and poses.

The title of this exhibition, Intangible space, is a phrase taken from the work De rerum natura (On the Nature

of Things), written by the philosopher and poet Lucretius in the first century A.D. In it, the author, reflecting

on the nature of the world that surrounds us, determined that matter and the void are elements that do not

exist in isolation but rather, form a unit. That union is what makes movement possible.

But yet creation’s neither crammed nor blocked

About by body: there’s in things a void

There’s place intangible, a void and room.

For were it not, things could in nowise move.

Hence, the phrase evokes the concept of the tactile and its spatial component in tandem with movement,

which is in turn an essential component of this selection. At the same time, Lucretius referred to an impalpable

condition that is 

• Curatorship:  Pilar Romero Cajigal
• Artists: Matt Ager, Paloma Bosqué, Olga de Amarral, Jorge Eduardo Eielson, Lucio Fontana, Cynthia Gutiérrez, Donna Huanca, Eva Kotatkova, Perla Krauze, Jason Martin, Gabriel Orozco, R.H. Quaytman, Pamela Rosenkranz, Liat Yossifor.
• Ninth curatorship for CIAC offices, 2024