This document is the informational brochure for the exhibition Redundancias featuring works by Colombian-Chilean artist Mario Opazo. The show was held at the gallery of the northern campus of the Alliance Française in Bogotá from May 18 through June 12, 2004. The document’s format is a folded brochure on A5 paper with four parts: outer front and back covers and two inner pages. The front cover contains the title of the show as well as some images of works in it and the Alliance Française’s logo; the back cover also contains information about the event (title of the show, date, and place) as well as a brief summary of the artist’s career. The inner pages contain larger versions of the images on the cover as well as the text written for the exhibition by its curator, Carmen María Jaramillo. The text provides a detailed description of the visual components of Opazo’s proposal, offering a clear and precise argument for the existence of connections between the elements used in this installation and the concerns that run though Opazo’s work in sculpture. Jaramillo analyzes Opazo’s work in terms of the notion of process, which she sees as pertinent to a questioning of the issues surrounding the reception of art and the communication of ideas in the art world.

This text sheds light on both the formal and conceptual concerns and the context surrounding the reflection on sculpture in the work of Mario Opazo (b. 1969) pursuant to his 1995 exhibition Planeta para Giselle held in the project room of the Museo del Arte Moderno of Bogotá [see doc. no. 1131615].

The images on the cover and inside the brochure illustrate how a boomerang can be cut out and carved, and then assembled, like a sculpture from a piece of Styrofoam. Opazo sent the boomerang resulting from the process via FEDEX to himself at an invented address in France. Carmen María Jaramillo (b. 1958) interprets the act of sending the object in terms of lightness and impermanence and, as such, as a formal and conceptual questioning of the notion of sculpture. Another image in the brochure shows the FEDEX website with a subtle alteration: the name that appears is “Fed-Ex” in reference to “belief in what we do not see.”  

Jaramillo asserts that the exhibition entails “art talking about art.” With the back and forth of the boomerang as an artistic process, Opazo re-signifies the concepts of “faith” and “sculpture.” The work becomes the problem of conveying ideas and of belief in what is not seen. Jaramillo rightly associates this work with the video gnaremoob (2004), also exhibited in the show, in which the Colombian-Chilean artist repeatedly throws a piece of marble against a wall. Jaramillo sees this as an image of resistance presented as an act of insistence in contemporary art practices. These readings give rise to reflection on the impact of contemporary art and its operational strategies.  

A historian and researcher, Carmen María Jaramillo is currently (2010) a professor at the Universidad de los Andes. She is also the coordinator of the Colombian team for the Documents of 20th-century Latin American and Latino Art project of the International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in conjunction with the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia. In 2009, she was the director of the Banco de la Republica’s Unidad de Artes and other collections.