“Grammars: a solo exhibition by Andrés Barón. Two screens show the film Grammars, produced in collaboration with the musician Dreamcrusher in 2021, and Fresco (tres veces), made in 2022. The screens are arranged on a fine synthetic island of roots and cables, vegetation of screens on riser. Revealing their reverse side to those who enter the space, the screens appear to be parasitised by smaller screens that broadcast a loop of fragments of action, a sort of finished scene. Although they appear to be closed loops, the apparent arrangement of cables and hooks evokes an open system that would allow continuous exchanges of matter and energy with the exhibition ecosystem. They are also reminiscent of control monitors or dashboards: visual interfaces that offer dynamic sequences of other environments. They are a kind of soft surveillance information peripheral, interested more in the image and composition of the environment being monitored than in its content. Gravitating on the periphery of the island and forming its background, are photographs that are sometimes repeated, taken within the exhibition space. Through this game of doubling, recurrence, mise en abyme and interference, a face returns persistently.
The text accompanying the exhibition is a transcription of four conversations provoked and fabricated around the exhibition. The names have been changed.

CONVERSATION ONE - THE MAGICIAN
The magician enters the space occupied by the prompt, as agreed, and the prompter initiates the conversation. She wants to make the magician talk.
The prompter : There’s so much of you here.
The magician : It was your idea.
The prompter : And your gestures.
The magician : I’m programmed to produce one-second flash shows.
The prompter : And I’m programmed to prompt mini-shows and grab them.
The magician : But sometimes the shows you ask for have no content. You even leave out the gestures. Your stories have props, that’s all. Like last time, there was just a glass, something to break the glass, nails and the sky. What you prompt are dramas about objects.
The prompter: Yes, that time I brought data and you turned it into a facial melodrama. What did you have in mind?
The magician : To be the character.

CONVERSATION TWO - THE SOURCE
Signal phones Amanda and puts her on speaker. She only has one question.
Signal: What are you thinking when you send me this?
Amanda: I think it’s little spirits visiting me. Maybe my mum. I capture them and send them to you in case you need them.

CONVERSATION THREE: THE REVIEW
[Muzak playing in the background]
At the table, facing each other and their bowls, X and Y talk, a little too aware of their roles.
Y: I’m thinking of emulating the show, simulating it.
X: What about emulsifying the show? A mixture of immiscible substances: stage ingredients in the process of being added, but just before the equivalent, a formula before its resolution, before its transformation into a greater whole.
Y: A sort of code or apparent grammar. A grammar specific to each film.
X: With its own alphabet, its own syntactic constructions, its limiting formulas through which a microcosm can be constructed.
Y: Its own mini galaxy.
X: And all its parallel galaxies.
Y: Yes, but with the protagonists returning, always the same, and always a little different. Each exposure would create new elemental and chemical compositions, completely transforming the ecosystems present. But the protagonists adapt, they mutate too.

CONVERSATION FOUR: THE NETWORK
Jane Today: How do you generate a mini-show?
Baby: You think of the thousand ways of avoiding familiarity, but look: unexpected repetition, the drama of a play on perspective, a change of protagonists, the recurrence of protagonists, a misunderstanding, the expected, the surprise of the wrong gesture, the surprise of the right gesture.

Text | Jade Barget