Blas Isasi

An idea is just the shape of a flower | Art Exhibition The Front, New Orleans, 2022

Following in the footsteps of numerous past Peruvian artists like Emilio Rodríguez Larraín, Juan Javier Salazar, and most notoriously Jorge Eduardo Eielson in making the desert a subject of their work, in An idea is just the shape of a flower, Isasi brings into play different key aspects, fragments, materials and symbols characteristic to this unique cultural landscape. By deploying various strategies, he intends to animate some of its most representative elements such as sand, clay, bones, etc. so as to put them in dialogue with each other in ways that seem counterintuitive, suggesting not only new connections and meanings but also other possible worlds. The accompanying presence of seamless metal structures in the installations hint to cartesian reason on the one hand, while evoking 20th-century Modernist design on the other, the quintessential aesthetics that symbolizes the unfulfilled promise of progress in the context of the Global South. The resulting tension from the juxtaposition of these seemingly opposing sets of elements is meant to, in the words of Raymond Williams, convey a “structure of feeling”: the feeling of things before we are able think them; the feeling of a different world before we can imagine it. In short, Isasi’s installation is a humble attempt to reenchant the world and sow the seeds of hope in a bleak and perilous age. Last but not least, this exhibition is meant as a heartfelt and critical homage to the arid and stunningly beautiful land he grew up on.