Indoor Flights

Ernesto Ballesteros
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1963.
He lives and works in Buenos Aires.

During the past twenty-five years, Argentine artist Ernesto Ballesteros has studied the invisible resonances of a wide variety of activities: drawing, comics, choreography, as well as indoor flight, optics, and discoveries in physics and astronomy. Ballesteros believes that an action taken by an artist has another dimension—another kind of energy— founded in the maker’s conviction or intention: “like a shaman, the artist emits just the right amount of energy to amaze us with something that we know to be much deeper and more powerful than what we see,” something that “has its roots in the visible, but that operates on a superior, subtle scale where words are unnecessary and the eye does not settle on any one thing in particular.”
In his series Indoor Flights, to be enacted at the Biennale di Venezia, Ballesteros renders the invisible visible: presenting the full weight, density, and materiality of air; making evident the line whose continuation generates other invisible lines that transcend the visual plane; and finally, the fragility of the present moment. The precise instant that one of his ultralight planes leaves his hand and takes to the air seems to bring us closer to the realm of magic than of mere physics, to the very threshold between the possible and the impossible. In addition, the artist exhibits himself at work, “inviting reflection on the energy invested by artists over centuries of work,” emphasizing the magic of intent, recurrence, and the enormous question of why art exists.