Sergio Suárez: The Substantiation of Time

6 October - 2 December 2023

  • Johnson Lowe Gallery is pleased to present Sergio Suárez: The Substantiation of Time as part of our current exhibition In Unity, as in Division.

     

    Sergio Suárez's work transcends traditional boundaries between mediums, using various materials and processes to depict metaphysical forces and cosmic mythologies. He amalgamates elements from different sources, creating a visual language concerned with syncretism, temporality, and porous boundaries between objects, images, and structures.

     

    The Substatiation of Time is accompanied by a series of excerpts by Italian writer and philosopher Federico Campagna.

  • “Wood as a medium allows me to slow down; it’s a meditative process that speaks of the plasticity of time.”

     

    — Sergio Suárez in "The Wonder of Woodcuts: How an ancient technique got its contemporary cool back" by Victoria Woodcock, financial Times

  • "In our own everyday experience, bodies and objects float over the dark surface of time. The world, which our minds struggle to solidify in stable forms, is in fact compressed in the speck of the present, ever-fading into an infinite past and giving way to the endless onslaught of the future. The permanence of objects through time, one of the main themes in Metaphysics, is investigated by Sergio Suarez’s works in a way that is at once poetic and philosophically resolved. Nothing truly persists from a moment to another – we can almost hear the paintings whispering – but everything remains always partly as-yet-unaccomplished, and partly already dissolved. Yet, it is precisely in its unfinishedness that we can appreciate the beauty of our world."
     
    — Federico Campagna
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  • "Everything floats, and each of us floats, over the dark expanse of an infinite time, like an ocean from which new forms continuously appear and disappear. While dread is the instinctive human response to this general instability, a reassuring message emerges from Sergio Suarez’s works. Rather than fearing the abyss, it is possible to contemplate it in its dark magnificence, and to establish a new familiarity with its depths. Despite its evanescence, or precisely because of it, the world around us can be understood again as an array of symbolic forms, each pointing to a reality that far exceeds their fleeting presence. Only the spheres, symbols of perfection, stand to remind us of the dream of perfection, like a utopian horizon that always recedes and yet, as Eduardo Galeano once said, that teaches us how and towards where we can keep on walking."

     

    — Federico Campagna

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  • Artist Statement

    Artist Statement

    "My work transgresses the traditional boundaries between mediums, mixing codes of representation, and historical processes. I begin by sampling sections from hand-carved woodblocks, compiling elements from different tableaux onto a single surface, layering, and giving form to a metaphysical space where physical forces swirl and tether together cosmic mythologies. As structures fragment, and narratives collide time seems to collapse, and the impression sets in that we may be seeing the same moment from multiple vantage points at once."

  • About Sergio Suárez

    About Sergio Suárez

    Sergio Suárez (B.1995) is a Mexican-born, Atlanta-based visual artist and printmaker. He graduated the Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design in 2021 with a B.F.A in Drawing Painting and Printmaking. His practice, prompted by an interest in translation, uses different traditions of making to construct a visual language concerned with syncretism, temporality, and the porosity between objects, images, and structures.

     

    His work has been shown around Atlanta, in spaces like Whitespace Gallery, Day & Night Projects, THE END Project Space, ShowerHaus Gallery, the Consulate General of Mexico in Atlanta, Take it Easy Gallery, and the Atlanta Contemporary. Internationally his work has been included in several group exhibitions such as the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair in London, the Haugesund Internasjonal Relief Festival in Norway, OPED Space in Tokyo, and the Ionian Arts Center in Greece; where he was an artist in residency in 2017 and 18.

     

    His work is also included in the SGCI archives of the Zuckerman Museum. He lives and works in Atlanta Georgia where he is part of the Studio Artist Program at the Atlanta Contemporary.
  • About Federico Campagna

    About Federico Campagna

    Federico Campagna is an Italian philosopher and writer based in London. Campagna is a Lecturer in Intellectual History at ECAL in Lausanne; an Associate Fellow at the Warburg Institute in London; and a Critical Fellow at the Royal Academy Schools in London. He works as rights director at the UK/US radical publisher Verso, and as senior editor at the Italian philosophy publisher Timeo, which he co-founded.

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    Campagna spent over twenty years in Milan, where he was active in the anarchist/autonomist networks and co-founded the street-poetry collective Eveline. In 2007 he moved to London, where he currently resides. In 2009 he started a long-term collaboration with the Italian Autonomia philosopher Franco Berardi 'Bifo'. In that same year, he co-founded the (now defunct) multilingual platform for critical theory Through Europe.

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    He has a PhD from the Royal College of Art, London, with a thesis on Metaphysics and Metaethics in the Design of Strategy Video Games (available here), an MSc and a BSc in Economics and Management of the Arts from Bocconi University, Milan, and an MA in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths University, London.