Amenaza (left, 2015) and Alba (right, 2015)

Eduardo Basualdo
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1977.
He lives and works in Buenos Aires.

The art of Eduardo Basualdo is one of passages and thresholds: Between the material and the immaterial, the visible and the invisible, the word and the thing. But his work is also between different moments in time—for these, the artist prefers the notion of limbo, though not the concept considered as a final destination for unsaved souls but as a waiting-space: the prenatal wait within the womb, the imminence of impending dawn. His work is designed to fill the viewer with the expectation that something else is about to happen or to be seen, beautiful or terrifying, ready to pounce or fall, endowing the dictum of the Argentinean writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges—“the aesthetic experience is, perhaps, the imminence of a revelation that does not occur”—with full sensorial, even material strength. In this conception, man is an amphibian creature, always on the verge of crawling out from the water onto land, from matter into spirit, from bodily organs to the mind, and then back again.
Basualdo’s works—whether we want them to do so or not— will train our eyes to perceive what is not there, what lies beyond. In his works (in his worlds) there is always more than meets the eye: and what does meet the eye is there to lead it towards this dimension of the yet unseen. However much there might be, there is always more: a chink in an otherwise solid door, some extra space and emptiness behind or beyond the continuous lines of everyday life, the ghostly image of what lies beneath the table or behind the wall, the visible shadow of the hidden blade. His art constructs a peepshow into other worlds.