Aquí no es así by Ramón Saturnino presents three objects and two photographs, transforming concepts of territorial and social ordering into abstract forms. In Lodos, a wire fence conditions the entrance to the room, where two diptychs of standing walls, encapsulated in glass—one rectangular and the other square—are exhibited.

These artifacts suggest the multitude of fences, barriers, wire mesh, stakes, glass, and even hedges or other inhospitable natural environments – such as the border desert itself. These elements emerge and re-emerge as products of commercial, social, and geopolitical inventiveness that generate spaces: thus marking a front and a back, an inside and an outside, or a here and a there. The visual reference point is the landscape of the Desierto de Altar—a place where the artist grew up and lived for the first eighteen years of his life—where these objects of delimitation resist the heat, drought, and wind of Sonora, suggesting a morbid foreboding for those who intend to cross. They are simultaneously interwoven with references to the urban context of Mexico City, where elements such as glass shards affixed to walls, concrete moulds, and even the road grid itself satisfy the need to divide spaces and direct bodies.

Through this sculptural exercise, Saturnino transforms the accidental features of these objects -their twisted wires, chipped paint, handwrought supports and counterweights, deteriorated by the heat, dust and movement of their environment - into formal elements to be examined: transparency and opacity, volume and gravity, texture and color, proportion and scale, shadow and light. All three sculptures present here are notable for the repetition that places one wire after another, emphasizes the brittle quality of the drywall, and strips the objects of their color as a neutralizing gesture.

Saturnino creates a new colorless landscape through his objectual portraits. Rather than a landscape faithful to his imaginary, it is an alternate plane where the objects do not fulfill functions, nor do they play roles. Instead, they coexist in their parts in front of the viewer's gaze, who intends to surround them in order to find nothing more and nothing less than walls.

The objects in Saturnino's landscape are walls placed in front of other walls: a fence in front of a wall, two walls erected in front of a wall. Thus, they are object-barriers that disarticulate the sense of guarding the passage from one place to another; they have exhausted the function that conceived them. In the process, their symbolic state is eroded and what remains are only the physical relationships that enable their form, and that declare them unresolved, indecipherable objects, withdrawn from human understanding.

The call of Aquí no es así is one that moves us towards experience. Saturnino invites us to avoid theorizing or interpreting objects, but to ask ourselves the impossible questions: What do these objects hide on the other side, when on the other side there is nothing? How do these objects persist when we do not look at them.

(press realize writen by Paloma Gómez Puente )