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Tomas Saraceno and Space's Civic Exploration


This Argentinian artist masterly combines genius with a sort of evolutionary compromise.

Father of Taoism Lao Tzu once said that when “the wise man looks into space he knows there are no limited dimensions.” Curiously enough, 27 centuries later, Tomas Saraceno’s work takes us back to the same premise, that is: space engages with the bodies it contains in order to merge with them at last.

By forcing the limits of design, architecture and engineering, and by deconstructing the conventions of each discipline, Saraceno expresses a unique philosophy, a spirit we could define as a spatial-civic experimentation. And according to this premise, the Argentinean artist can transform an exhibition space into a well-balanced ecosystem —the gallery shakes off all of its glamorous costumes and ends up reasserting itself as what it really is, a biosphere.

Saraceno seeks balance through the dialogue between form and space. Whether with his clouds-inspired structures, his spider web or his galaxies, his exploration, which generally involves a complex geometrical discourse, is looking to answer the great questions that rule human reality—unfolding thus the commitment originated in the geniality of characters like Buckminster Fuller.

Nowadays, the Argentinean artist —who is currently exhibiting his installation called Cloud City in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City— has established himself as one of the most famous Latin American artists in the contemporary art scene.

But beyond the remarkable talent manifested in his work, it may well be that what makes his work into something truly passionate is the fact that he does not hesitate when erasing the borders that break different disciplines, and rather puts them to work in service of a potential evolution. In this way he performs a job that should be implicit in the acts of every man aspiring to be considered an artist, something that many have apparently forgotten all about.

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