Celeste
Guadalajara, MX. October 2020

Text by Viviana Kuri

According to the Tao, there is a danger to fixing the meaning of reality:
those who hold to words are to be feared, presuming as they do a certain
superiority and exercising a supposed control. As the Chinese Taoist
Chuang Tzu phrased it: “Where can I find a man who has forgotten
words so I can have a word with him?”*

We are looking for someone not bound by commonplaces, som
eone without the ready word that barely illuminates, someone who knows
how to be silent and non-judgmental. Someone who breaks the silence
with humility, in order to say something that cannot wait. Celeste is the
empty space, free to be inhabited. A term derived from the Latin word for
“sky,” which also evokes the ideas of concavity, hollowness, void: the
heavenly vault, which has to be empty in order to mean something.

María Fernanda and Gabriel have found a word to designate their silent
pictorial language. Large canvases that move in a subtle astral shift. Blue.
Abstract paintings subject to different interpretations, depending on the
gaze that observes them, also in silence.

If museums are places of healing, that is because the remedy is a decision
by those who resolve to allow themselves to be carried away by what is
before them, by those willing to get out of themselves, in order to return
as changed and different people.

Two brutal events anticipated the exhibition. Celeste is the first show
organized by the MAZ as it reopens its doors after months of closure
owing to the pandemic. A virus that travels the world with speed, along
the paths of commercial aircraft, a new means of propagation. And just
before that, a “green wave” changed the status quo and left the heads of
men tottering and women too. Never again without women, without us.

*Garcés M, Filosofía inacabada.