Six months ago, we invited six artists to think about the minimal expression of their practice. What are the advantages of this minimal approach? The opposite—the maximalist approach— encourages excess and leads us to deceit. A minimalist approach, on the other hand, given its irremediable irrelevance, is settled with one truth. Just one. Any truth. No matter how small. This exhibition arises from a conversation between Manuela, Paulina, Pedro Laura, David, and Daniel, and brings together those minimal certainties. A constellation of shadows and dots, of unpredictable lights and luminous puddles, of miraculous eruptions, of tiny planets and tripled suns. A constellation of weightless bodies.

Así, el domingo (Thus, on sunday), Pedro Montilla’s non-painting, reveals a crossroads of red and dotted lines. The thin thread prevents the fique from breaking completely and serves as a reminder that everything is susceptible to breaking on a Sunday afternoon. Next to it, a succession of dots appears like a legion of tiny black holes. A series of perforations that mark a path. A path backwards. A path groped for, lost in the search for a place that no longer exists. The ghost of light that seeps through the holes casts a shadow, the shadow of a lone walker. A single long, interrupted shadow, broken, like the red thread that ties the fique at its most fragile point.

In Daniel Salamanca’s installation, Al final de cada verso, aparece un abismo” (At the end of each verse, an abyss appears), that verse casts a sinuous shadow, which rises and curves and seems to find a haven of stability and order. A fleeting balance. A portal of zapote-colored light opens behind the threshold of a half-open door. A sleepy veil hangs like an exhausted shirt and betrays the arbitrariness of any staging. In the end, the verse plunges back into the void. It is the voice of the abyss that tempts us. But in the darkest part of the pit there are other lights; and there, at the bottom of the precipice, a pool of shimmering light shines.

El mar es un charco (The sea is a puddle), is the title of Laura Noguera’s painting in which a glass spills a sea of green-blue glows and sparkles. Nearby, a volcanic eruption fits in the palm of a hand. Two hands come together and form a volcano that implores for a miracle. Like the tiny volcano that spews magma onto the palm of the hand on which the future is written, and like the green-blue pools of oceanic proportions, miracles defy the most basic laws of proportion. There are no big or small miracles. Their very existence is as emphatic as the eruption of volcanoes and as a spilled glass of water.

David Rodríguez Yepes’ pieces compose a silent, narrative poem. A silent story of echoes and hesitations. The smallest miracle is announced to a mother in Fra Angelico's reinterpretation. The halos rhyme with two curved twigs placed back to back like two inverted parentheses. Parentheses that do not enclose, but open. Those in which a clarification is superfluous, but in which, in the end, the world could fit. The planet Earth is revealed as a tiny body compared to a golf ball and a grain of sand. An eclipse is shipwrecked in the ambiguity of the twilight, as if the shadow clung to the light and the light clung to the shadow. A crane walks cautiously on its fingertips.

Ironically, the minimum made us imagine titanic bodies. The stars mark distant points in mythology and the randomness of the celestial map. Manuela Caicedo’s painting, El fenómeno de los tres soles en China (The phenomenon of three suns in China), allows us to fantasize about the seemingly stable certainties of astronomy. The minimum can also be multiple. The sunlight triples in the parhelion and plants a seed of doubt. There is nothing new under the sun, but under three suns a pegasus is born. On the other side, a series of references to past and future projects unfold. Two heavenly muses act as shutters for the curtain of the Theater of death. Dragonflies, disfigured and mutant self-portraits, swarm as if emerging from the mouth of hell. Death, ultimately, is nothing more than the minimal expression of life.

Paulina Moncada paints a desolate landscape that is also a miniature theater. An absurd and lonely stage set. An inhospitable spectacle with no spectators other than herself. At the other end of the room, a dazzling body, the color of the cattails that grow on the riverbank, floats weightlessly in a thick lake. The existence loses gravity in water. Nothing weighs on that body. Nothing. The floating body tells us that in the end, in the solitude of the abyss, reduced to a single shadow, faced with the failure of spilled glasses and broken wings, there is always a fire that ignites, there is always some light that knows how to illuminate us. The minimal expression is an exhibition about vital minimums.

(Text by Pablo Guarín Robledo)