2018
Bilingual edition, Spanish/English
Texts: Javier Villa and Osvaldo Baigorria
Graphic Design: Pablo Alarcón and Alberto Scotti (Cerúleo Studio)
Translations: Ian Barnett
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68 pages
Format: 20 x 25 cm
ISBN 978-987-1358-56-4
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A journey through the photo series displayed in Pulse, an exhibition held at the
Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires in 2018. Accompanying these images
is Javier Villa’s curatorial text reflecting on his conversations with the artist and
another essay by the writer Osvaldo Baigorria that ponders the mystical aspects
of Nicolas Mastracchio~’s photography.
‘An adolescent when the digital age went public and entered people’s homes,
Nicolás Mastracchio~ has worked since 2007, researching the digital image’s
forms of production and consumption. Since 2011, he has been producing studio
photographs without the use of a post-production toolkit. He uses the direct shot
to dramatize the artificial space of digital images and so develop a commentary
on the new strategies and esthetics of media, advertising, and politics. Starting
in 2017, these images, which demanded of him meticulous conceptual and formal
control, welled up in a spontaneous flow informed both by certain traditions of the
native nomadic American peoples he studied on residencies in the United States
and Mexico, and by Zen principles, which he had started applying in his everyday
life. Zen ideas of movement and change motivated him to explore the ephemeral
nature of a small cosmos of objects ordered in a few short minutes with no rational
criterion, and then to photograph it. ’
Javier Villa
‘A recurrent theme that weaves in and out of my work—sometimes without me even
realizing—is the passing of time, or, as Buddhist texts call it, impermanence. This
appears in the ideas I have and the forms I make; in the ephemeral, the almost
imperceptible that materializes and disappears; in these images suspended by
minimal threads on the brink of collapse. Just the way this is an intuitive work,
I imagine it arises from a different biographical detail: understanding mortality at
an early age. I guess that was what led me to get into these themes, and to enjoy
and celebrate transience. ’
Nicolás Mastracchio~
