Under the same sky, Martín Weber

2022

Curatorial text

Herlitzka + Faría gallery
City of Buenos Aires, Argentina

How does the past inhabit the present? How does history become palpable? What kind of memory are objects and bodies capable of preserving? A radical determination of beauty is embodied in the violence of Martín Weber’s “Días Peronistas”. This series of irregular blotches – grouped or scattered, more intense or more subdued, more or less saturated, running through different gradations of Prussian blue – summons a feeling of the sublime that brings to presence a trace and its withdrawal. Because these cyanotypes are both gesture and archive of the contact with the Blindex that protected Juan Domingo Perón’s coffin, once broken with hammers to cut and remove his hands. The subtle papers emulsified by Weber function as a cenotaph in its most literal sense, as an empty funerary monument that does not contain the corpse but instead points to something that has happened and has been lost.

A presence then emerges, sedimented both in the very materiality of the glass – subjected to movements, outrages, physical and judicial procedures over three decades – and through the photographic device that chemically recorded that arrested movement. “Días peronistas” is part of the project Historias encarnadas, in which Weber is interested in that kind of past that does not precede the present, but is housed in it, emerging with the varied faces of anachronism. A past that, in moments of crisis and disintegration, suddenly assaults us, as Walter Benjamin said, in an “instant of danger”.

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