2025
Impossible
show - ALMACÉN 47, CENTRAL AFFAIR
“In all figurative art, recognition is a basic condition.
We must recognize what is represented in an image
for the artistic intention to be realized.
And recognizing the motif in an image means identifying it
with aspects of reality that we know through experience.”
Chris Mortensen,
The Impossible Arises:
Oscar Reutersvärd and his contemporaries, 2022
The rhythm does not depend on the walker but on the clock.
The universe presents us with infinite challenges to which we are exposed daily in our everyday lives. Mathematical, physical, and chemical theories can explain its workings almost perfectly, but not completely, and this is where the social and human sciences make their contribution. Even religions uphold the universal framework, and each person clings to the explanation that guides their life.
Every step we take, anywhere in the world, invites us on a four-dimensional journey, and the best example that describes this is climbing—or descending—a hill, a mountain. As we ascend, we travel along the x, y, and z axes of three dimensions, but time also continues to move forward, even if we are not aware of it at every moment. These four variables can be combined, but it is impossible to equate them: the first three are stated in length measurements, the fourth precisely in units of time. One can choose one's place in three dimensions and thus control space, but one can never control time, neither stop it nor slow it down.
Estellano nourishes his practice with enough geometry to ensure that his interventions are made with small fragments of figures that lead to a different one. Moreover, he does so subtly, generating transparent depths where the real background of the image can often be seen, bringing lightness to the plane, which seems to transform into space.
What is impossible is not the recognition of the scenes, of the images created, but the belief that time is cyclical, when in reality it is a true loop that advances constantly. Santiago creates a spatial geometric fiction where he mixes images from different times, but he cannot stop it. We believe that time is cyclical, because its units of measurement are, but in reality it is an infinite spiral through which we advance, where the rhythm does not depend on the walker but on the clock.
Leo Mayer, September 2025
The visual possibility of the impossible.
This is a project exploring the geometric world in which we live, a complex perspective of the universe that challenges our intellect. A four-dimensional space where the three spatial dimensions plus the time dimension coexist.
Geometric figures that are possible to create on a plane, but impossible to exist in space. Three-dimensional bodies that float and defy the coordinates of spatial geometry: height, length, and width, where time is also incorporated as a fundamental axis.
The representation of these objects in two-dimensional images is possible.
So, what exactly is contradictory?
What is impossible is materializing these images in space. Through quasi-mathematical exercises, these works, created with analog methods and artificial intelligence, present us with a transformed image, where the result of these equations is inconsistent with traditional Euclidean geometry. The incorporation of the time coordinate generates questions and uncertainty in the interpretation of what is being contemplated.
This is an artistic production where modern concepts impossible to create in ordinary space are represented through a contemporary construction. The infinite loop is explicit not only in the geometric figures, but also in the creation of works generated from an image in two different dimensions or from the image itself.
This series invites us to reflect on time, space, the absence of external limits, the interconnectedness of all things, and the cyclical nature of the universe. The visual possibility of the impossible.
Santiago Estellano, August 2025
SOUND CONNECTION
Sound of singing bowls as a time coordinate
ACTIVATION
PERFORMER FLAVIO PAZOS
Impossible explores four-dimensional space. Resonant sound expands and fades in space, becoming a tool for representing time. Duration, cadence, and echo are physical and tangible manifestations of the passage of time.
Auditory cycles dialogue with the visual loops of the works.
The bowls in this context generate uncertainty and questions about the meaning of what is being contemplated. It is not a meditation, but rather a sound performance where the audience is free to interact with the sound in a purely perceptual way. The focus is on listening, feeling the vibrations, and connecting that sound in space.
Just as there is diversity in the production of the works—collages, artificial intelligence, and sculpture—the bowls act as an analogical and ritual medium that dialogues with contemporary concepts of the four-dimensional. It is a way of anchoring the concept of the ancestral and physical within the mathematical abstractions of impossible figures.
Santiago Estellano, August 2025
About Flavio Pazos
He has been practicing sound therapy for four years, using ancestral instruments including gongs, Tibetan singing bowls, shamanic and oceanic drums, quartz singing bowls, samaphones, and others. He provides participants with a safe and trusting space that allows them to be guided by vibration and sound on a sensorial journey. He has studied in Chile with Matías Giménez Hutton and in Uruguay with Verónica Lattice, both in velomancy and Agni Yoga. He is a yoga instructor and studies how sound and vibration work on the physical body.