Tal vez la urgencia del arribo extienda mi lenguaje (Maybe the urgency of arrival will extend my language)School of Fine Arts of Paris, ENSBA Paris16 June 2023

At the École des Beaux-Arts, Sofía Salazar Rosales presents a sublime gathering of fundamental pieces from her arsenal, which enunciate not only the end of her studies but also a moment of absolute maturity in her career and in her relationship with sculpture and installation. Maybe the urgency of arrival will extend my language, then, becomes an exercise of experimentation and reaffirmation of the author in front of the handcrafted work and the manipulation of the object: that object to which the artist herself gives life with her hands, from scratch. Thus, the objects and materials with which Sofía works are not ordinary objects, but rather they breathe, embrace, touch, cry, languish and seem to carry with them the history -or stories- of all the concerns that accompany the artist.

Driven by the urgency to reach -none or everywhere-, to take root and sow seeds, Salazar is obsessed with the lives, origins and functions of the materials, many of them coming from the vernacular construction used in areas of Latin America and the Caribbean to, starting from that obsession with materiality and form, speak to us poetically of rootlessness, the past and reinvention.

Thus, the works gathered here express to a large extent part of the aesthetic and formal concerns of the artist: the relationship between the global and the local, the dialogue with the concept of heritage, civil and urban architecture as poetic resources of confrontation, the pedestrian circulation in front of the vertiginous growth of the city, the exploitation of natural elements in dependence of the dynamics of agro-production and agro-export, among others…

Text by Dayneris Brito

Sofía Salazar Rosales, Installation view of Tal vez la urgencia del arribo extienda mi lenguaje (Maybe the urgency of arrival will extend my language), School of Fine Arts of Paris, ENSBA Paris, 2023

Sofía Salazar Rosales, Zafra (ghost), 2020-2023; Installation view of Tal vez la urgencia del arribo extienda mi lenguaje (Maybe the urgency of arrival will extend my language), School of Fine Arts of Paris, ENSBA Paris, 2023; Sugar, betadine, glass aggregate, fabric, gelcoat, polyester resin, polyglass resin and wood; 70 × 100 × 36 cm

Sofía Salazar Rosales, When the axial skeleton decides to speak, 2023; Installation view of Tal vez la urgencia del arribo extienda mi lenguaje (Maybe the urgency of arrival will extend my language), School of Fine Arts of Paris, ENSBA Paris, 2023; Glass aggregate, polyglass, resin, fiberglass, vinyl glue, metal and seed beads; 271 × 196 × 25.5 cm

Sofía Salazar Rosales, They seek to set roots, 2022; Installation view of Tal vez la urgencia del arribo extienda mi lenguaje (Maybe the urgency of arrival will extend my language), School of Fine Arts of Paris, ENSBA Paris, 2023; Glass aggregate, polyglass, resin, fiberglass, bull’s eye, seed, bronze powder, glass, beads and vinyl glue; 177.5 × 78 × 26 cm

Sofía Salazar Rosales, When the axial skeleton decides to speak, 2023; Installation view of Tal vez la urgencia del arribo extienda mi lenguaje (Maybe the urgency of arrival will extend my language), School of Fine Arts of Paris, ENSBA Paris, 2023; Glass aggregate, polyglass, resin, fiberglass, bull’s eye, seed, bronze powder, glass, beads and vinyl glue; 177.5 × 78 × 26 cm

Photos by Tiphaine Popesco, Kevin Andrés Cristi, Sacha Boccara