For Cynthia Kampelmacher the bush is an excuse, it is a moment fixed in her memory, an encounter with the dense vegetation of the jungle in Panama seven years ago, while at an art residency. An originating moment, most likely a happy one. A photography taken then has become the foundational stone for a series of works Kampelmacher has been doing since, returning again and again to the image of the bush, as a metonymic substitute for memory and experience, and the fragility of both.

The works in this show reveal part of the toolbox utilized by Kampelmacher to build a poetics of levity, fragmentation and dissolution. Each of them appears to be surrounded by silence. “In order to remain silent, it is necessary to talk” wrote Maurice Blanchot, a way of stating that in order to express what defies representation it is necessary to attempt representing it.

he works presented in this exhibition are part of this unitary project in which the artist approaches that originating image through series of iterations, a programatic attempt to represent that which cannot be represented, to de-fragment and reconstruct the intensity of a single lived moment, even when this is a futile endeavor. Kampelmacher veils the image, fragments it further in order to reconstruct it, layers it with another version of itself, cuts it up. Her working process could be described with the metaphor of the sea water recurrently hitting against the rocks on the shore. Each wave hits the rocks one after another, taking a different shape with each encounter.

In late modernity, the idea of the the impossibility of a totalizing vision of the world has reached a certain consensual acceptation (Gianni Vattimo, among others). Cynthia Kamplemacher’s work is about the impossibility of a unified image, a reference to this status of knowledge, but also a stubborn endeavor to attempt to recover the purity of experience.

In her work there is often a play between photographic print and manual process. One of the works in the exhibition appears to be a bad print made with a defective ink-jet printer or maybe one with little ink left, nevertheless on close inspection the work reveals itself to be a laborious hand-made drawing.

A seductive, beautiful quality is evident in the works in this exhibition, but this should not distract from the philosophical dimension of Cynthia Kampelmacher’s projects, which needs to be regarded in the context of her multifaceted art practice which has included interventions like the one at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rosario,
where she rearranged their the chaotic administrative offices and constructed a spiraling installation with the cardboard boxes and other remains from the process of tidying up or an imposing Doric style column at an institutional space made entirely of vulnerable letter size printing paper.