The Perfect Place at StudioBlock M74, Mexico City, Mexico
Curated by Janila Castaneda
18 March 2022 to 3 April 2022
«You don’t arrive at the perfect place,» I thought.
«The perfect place is a feeling you inhabit.»
If utopia is built on desire, what are the desires that lead us to this pristine space?
The Perfect Place. No one can intercede; the encounter with this place lies within oneself. We are cartographers of our own realms of perfection. The Perfect Place highlights perfection as a failure in itself. It is a simulation that questions the distance between truth and falsehood, reality and imagination. It invites us to step into a fourth dimension defined by the structures of desire. While reality is an affirmation, The Perfect Place remains a question. Perfect, from the Latin per (completely) and facere (to make): to make something completely, something finished. A belief. It’s the beach, the jungle, the forest. It’s what will come tomorrow. It’s belonging. A destination. A cold coconut under a palm tree. A goal. The reward for effort. A place beyond doubt. The raw material of a travel agency. Something far away. Something you must reach. Something to build. It’s a dream, a fantasy. Awakening. Mild weather. A blank mind. Does the perfect place exist? It’s dancing in the kitchen when no one is watching. It’s the first contact of water on your tongue on a hot day. It’s what exists within the four walls that protect me. It’s an act that involves awakening the senses. It’s fleeting. It’s the search for a mental state. It’s desire. To create something completely free of flaws or defects, as close as possible to an ideal condition.
After a six-month residency at Studio Block M74, and driven by the desire to construct her own understanding, Maria Positano proposes a game between inward quests and universal symbols of opulence and perfection. Materials such as egg cartons, plastic toys painted gold, corn, and seeds form the foundation of this utopian construction. The Perfect Place emphasises perfection as a failed attempt in itself: the search without expecting to find anything as a research methodology, the search expecting to find everything—an inevitable human condition. As in sculpture, desire is not real until it occupies a space. In this body of work, Maria Positano constructs a landscape that explores personal and universal concepts of meaning: an altar of objects rescued from oblivion, a hierarchy of individual desires translated into space. The Perfect Place is the result of observations, introspections, trials, errors, repetitions, and failures. It’s finding perfection in the imperfect, a stage that turns forgotten objects into sculptural structures. Materials on the brink of ruin come together to create visual rhythms in a back-and-forth between fragility and memory.
Text by Janila Castaneda
The Perfect Place
StudioBlock M74
Moctezuma 74
Guerrero, Cuauhtémoc
CDMX, Mexico
06300
18 March 2022 to 3 April 2022
Courtesy of Registro Arte