Ben Zawalich (Boston, USA)
Ben Zawalich studied engraving at the Royal College of Art, London. He has a Master’s degree in Painting from Boston University and a Master’s degree in Engraving from the University of Massachusetts. Ben works from the imagination of the primitive peoples, creating new archaeological forms that allude to different civilizations without belonging to any of them. That is how his work creates a new system of old images from which monsters and travelers of new times appear. During the residency he worked with Matías Amici and with Jorge Pomar and Christian Riffel at Casa Omar. As a closure to his process, the works were exhibited at Espacio Paraguay.
Curatorial text.
PAPEL FALSO, this exhibition is part of the closing of Ben Zawalich's residence in Buenos Aires. A crossing between installation and lithography.
To generate an approximation to his work, we will remember Didi-Huberman who tells us that, when confronting an image we must consider the histories that conditioned it: its execution, the transfers, the wars and more. A whole latent journey under the image that survives and remains untouched.
Zawalich's work has an air of resistance, it seems to have traveled a long time to reach us. The reiteration of the stamp, the baroque frame with pre-Columbian airs gives ritual dyes and a great epic rests on the main character's gaze.
We are spectators of a great simulation, fake roles that play to be antiques and beyond deceit captivate us with their stories of hectic skins.
Ben Zawalich works "faking temporality", his work makes its way by resonating with our memories, perhaps it is that the memory of the symbol and the deities always repeat and resemble. A collective imaginary where all our gods and myths rest, that same imaginary that awakens to this type of catalysts.
Papel Falso conquers its time and reminds us that beyond the certainties that we can have something is for sure: that before any work of art We are the fragile element. A native of Boston, Ben is a traveling artist, taking the residences as a personal growth space where as he tells us he is encouraged by the production conditions of each place to develop projects according to the spaces he visits.
