4 Minutes of Darkness
February- May 2024, OMR, Mexico City.
Eduardo Sarabia´s solo show at OMR, 4 Minutes of Darkness honors Desire, Imagination, the possibilities of the Universe and that which emerges in the shadows, where other kind of light shows us different ways of being in the world. This exhibition evokes the opacity and shade generated by a total solar eclipse; not blackness, but a low lightness in which the silhouette and other textures come to life to see a little more beyond the brightness and solar glare. As a kind of portal, Sarabia offers for us a space in which we can imagine another dimension, almost magical, dedicated to daydreaming and the celestial bodies. The artist's recent project takes up an aspect in his artistic language that, although it has been present since the 2000s (If this world was mine, 2003), has continued to appear in his work: the power of Imagination and Desire as a projection of future. Through an architectural structure that encourages us to return to the center of things, in the form of a chapel, Sarabia shares with us his interest in ancestral, alchemical, or mystical knowledge. Mainly, it is based on the recognition of the past and the journey as a starting point and as a transition to another place, or to other diverse places, to the vision that at times escapes the present but that illuminates wisdom, honor and will.
4 Minutes of Darkness is conformed by a stained glass window that places light as the main protagonist; soft light that illuminates a fountain of the darkness in which different characters wake up. This fountain (in spanish the word also means “source”) is a tribute to what inspires us, and to that where we take information from. The references in what we filter and return to the world. Also throughout the history of art and the hermeneutics of alchemy, the fountain cites what is given and offered to us by life and that we can take from merit and abundance, or the Solar and Lunar Liquors that together give life to the philosophical sea turned into gold. This enveloping garden arises from a very personal language that the artist brings on this occasion to a circular and evolving exhibition in which his peculiar narratives take on a different meaning and the viewer becomes a witness of himself.
The whole installation recreates an architecture that reminds us of the antecedents of the Mexican hacienda, coming from Spanish and Arab culture. It is made up of a floor sculpture that dialogues with a stained glass window on the ceiling, surrounded by the traditional evocation of the sacred ceiba in the imagination of Sarabia. Sea and vegetation, Earth and Universe, Light, Darkness, the microstory and the Crow - like a new animal of power - articulate this exhibition that also presents a new series of paintings, more focused on outer space, and in a kind of fiction that aligns with Sarabia's personal and artistic development.
This is Eduardo Sarabia's first solo exhibition at OMR gallery since the beginning of its representation in March 2023, and the second of a triad of exhibitions dedicated to the total eclipse of the sun that will occur in April 2024 and that will be visible as such in Mazatlán, Sinaloa, where the artist's family is from. Prologue, London 2023; 4 MINUTES OF DARKNESS, CDMX 2024; and ECLIPSE, Sinaloa 2024, are part of a broad project that unfolds in different contexts, and that concludes with a series of collaborations between OMR, the Mazatlan local baseball team Los Venados, Mazatlán Art Museum and different institutions in order to recover this cultural space for the communities of Sinaloa.
Lorena Peña Brito
