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Eugenio Ampudia

‘Hold Infinity in the Palm of your Hand’ at Sala Alcalá 31 (Madrid)

Sep 13 - Nov 4, 2018

Sala Alcalá 31 presents 'Holding Infinity in the Palm of your Hand' by artist Eugenio Ampudia, curated by Blanca de la Torre. The exhibition is a survey of the artist's trajectory and includes a large-scale new central piece. The presentation of previous works and a new creation allows a new reading of the artistic concepts proposed by Eugenio Ampudia, inviting the spectator to take an active role in the exhibition.

“Hold infinity in the palm of your hand” appropriates William Blake’s verse to address the contingency of Art as a metaphorical place where everything is possible. A place where Art is consolidated as a tool of knowledge, as a prism to comprehend the world, a world where every decision and every road is determining.
It is developed as an installation that must be crossed by the spectator, a sort of mobile labyrinth created from the movement of the hands of nine clocks of various dimensions and placed at different heights. The clock hands, parallel to the floor, move with the passing of time continuously generating new paths, with or without exit.

This way, the artist plays with the spectator’s concern as they do not have the usual coordinates to comprehend the space while crossing the space. It is only when the piece is observed from the second floor when it can be contemplated with a bird’s eye view, and relate with the public that is crossing the labyrinth in that moment.

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The work references literary and philosophical texts, not only by aforementioned William Blake, but also by Borges, Plato, Proust, or Daniel Birnbaum, the most contemporary author of the list. In the case of this last one, Ampudia’s work could be analyzed in relation with a Delezian immanence, which the author elaborates on in his title Chronology. In order to relate it to Plato, we do not have to go further than Timaeus, where the philosopher asserts that time is the moving
imitation of eternity. For Proust, every day can be the same for a clock, but not for a man.

But it is perhaps “The Garden of Forking Paths” by Jorge Luis Borges the work most clearly referenced, in its reflection on time as an inextricable philosophical labyrinth. The book, like the installation, assumes the thesis of the existence of a forking time (or of times, in the case of the installation), that goes further than formulations of past philosophies, and holds all the possibilities before a fact, and every forking unchains other possibilities, allowing to give account of simultaneous realities in a hypothetically infinite universe.

The exhibition also includes the widely recognized libraries by Ampudia, and a selection of videos including Prado GP, En Juego, Museum and space, as well as his notorious series Dónde Dormir.

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