.For more than a century it was considered vain, and even inappropriate, to define art or, at least, to outline a concept of it or to sketch the contours of its scope. But today the dissipation of such contours demands continuous references to the limits that delimit the art-object in order to justify its existence and accredit the actuality of its idea. This demand, on the other hand, is motivated by the fact that what is most interesting in contemporary art occurs pressed against those limits and, in part, outside them. This is a fundamental question of the critical thinking of our time: what is and what is not art; that is, to what extent does the forgetting of limits and the incursion into the world of everyday or extraordinary realities constitute art..

The other question, a consequence of the first, has to do with the politics of the gaze. If art is contingent, it is not determined by a concept prior to its commissioning, but depends on circumstances of position and conjuncture: on how it is presented to the gaze. Unlike scopic vision, the gaze is intercepted by desire and, therefore, beset by lack. Art is nourished by this opposition between the visual order (that of the gaze, of the image) and the visible order, which seeks to verify the existence of something-other beneath the web of appearances. The gaze seeks that which does not end up appearing, that which is elsewhere, but not as if it were a hidden, invisible substance, but as if it were outside the field or arranged in such a way that the straight vision could not make it out. That which is arranged in image mode: that which is and is not. Or what is placed in a position of anamorphosis, tilted to one side.

Dimitri Kosiré’s work adds another twist to the complicated journey of the gaze: he approaches from the outside (or from the threshold) to diverse situations full of visuality, which swarm in different urban concentrations in Paraguay. The stalls selling infinitely disparate items, ranging from natural products to handcrafted, industrialized and electronic objects, form intense interweavings capable of shaping figures that go beyond the individuality of each object exhibited before the gaze. The gaze must be subjected to a powerful avalanche of shapes, colors, textures and diverse, generally opposing meanings. And such variegation constitutes both an obstacle and a challenge to the gaze. And it disarranges the logic of the market by half-hiding each merchandise in the torrential weft of the whole. This contradiction of the object-merchandise, which is shown retracting, constitutes the moment that most interests the artist. Dimitri sees in these hodgepodge, which he generically calls “little shops”, aesthetic moments (opened by another aesthetic) and poetic moments (moved by another poetry), both alien to the profitable economy that moves the market.

.The purely instrumental logic, based on calculation and profit, is disturbed by detours that push the gaze in different directions and promote lines of flight and misguided zigzags. Excess always refers to an absence: what is left over here is what is missing there. And this equation, improper in terms of consumption, is perfectly valid in the image circuit, which is enriched by displacing and dislocating its parts: preventing them from coinciding in the stable meaning of the stock exhibited for sale (interrupting the constitution of counted fetishes).

The deviation of the object from its commodity destiny disrupts the designed order of the exhibition: in fact, the little shops present the objects by interweaving them, enhancing the interaction of the figures through the whimsical association of colors, of wefts, of figures invented by the memory, the whim or the longing for any object, illuminated by the profusion of tones, excited by the reasons of intemperance.

Dimitri turns this disarrangement of the exhibition into the beginning of a different representation, linked to popular culture and alternative ways of conceiving the beautiful. Outside the canons of consecrated art, beauty is not based on harmony, balance and unity of the whole: it can shine, briefly, murkily, provoked by the friction of dissonant elements. It can appear, elusive, amidst the promiscuity of overlapping figures, discordant colors and clashing forms. Because the reason for different aesthetics (of contemporary aesthetics, ultimately) depends on the oscillation of the gaze, which, hesitating between one object or another, renews meanings, always unstable, but intense as incisions that puncture the stridency of what is presented. And it does so by searching for the truths-others: those excluded from the clear showcases of the total market and protected by the confusing prodigality of the local markets.

Ticio Escobar

Marzo, 2017, Asunción.

Escobar is a curator, professor, cultural critic, and cultural promoter. He is the founder of the Museo de Arte Indígena of Paraguay and has served as president of the Asociación de Apoyo a las Comunidades Indígenas del Paraguay and the Paraguayan section of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). He was Director of Culture of Asunción and served as Paraguay’s Minister of Culture from 2008 to 2013.

He was the principal author of the National Culture Law of Paraguay and co-author of the National Heritage Law. Escobar has written extensively on art theory and cultural studies, including his recent publication Aura Latente (Tinta Limón, 2021).

Throughout his career, he has received numerous international awards and honors, including decorations from Argentina, Brazil, and France. In 2021, he was awarded an honorary doctorate (Doctorado Honoris Causa) by the Universidad Nacional de Rosario. In Spain, he received the Bartolomé de las Casas Award for his support of Indigenous causes in the Americas. He is currently the director of the Centro de Artes Visuales/Museo del Barro in Asunción