2014
Bilingual edition, Spanish/English
Texts: Rafael Cippolini, Jimena Ferreiro and Victoria Noorthoorn
Graphic Design: María Sibolich
Translations: Kit Maude
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272 pages
Format: 25x20cm
ISBN 978-987-1358-25-0
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This publication highlights an important set of works by the artist Sebastian Gordín,
who held his first retrospective exhibition at the Museo de Arte Moderno in 2014.
This is a highly coherent body of works which, accompanied by texts from Jimena
Ferreiro, walks a fine line between fiction and reality, naivety and critical acumen,
caricature and realism. It contains essays by Victoria Noorthoorn and Rafael Cippolini,
and a conversation with the artist outlining the origins of his interests, and his
relationship with irony, humour, fantasy and nightmare.
‘Gordín’s art sends a shiver down your spine. At the center of his work there is a
fundamental tension between language and content, between an amiable of form and
a disquieting setting, between an apparent childish naiveté and a keen vision of reality
and its contradictions. This reality is something that Gordín returns to again and again
during the conversation: “I associate imagination with the fantastic and this is why I
consider myself anti-fantastic. My work attempts to reproduce reality. My worlds are very
real worlds where imagination is kept in check”. Let us pause for a moment. I invite the
reader to flick through this book, and to linger over some of the images. Are these real
worlds? What reality are we talking about when we talk about reality in Godin’s artistic
practice? ’
Victoria Noorthoorn
