For its fifth participation in Art-o-rama, and its first as part of the selection committee, sissi club is pleased to present All direction is curved — All motion is spiral by Joshua Merchan Rodriguez.

Throughout his work, Merchan Rodriguez is interested in what he calls «knots»: points of convergence where historical, political, and poetic dimensions intertwine, and where transformations, displacements, and manipulations of matter take place. By pulling at the threads that make up these knots, he tries to render visible the complexities and tensions running through our human and interspecies relationships.

The exhibition’s title is borrowed from Walter Russell (1871–1963), painter and sculptor, friend of Nikola Tesla, who elaborated an entire cosmogony grounded in the curve and the spiral. What Joshua Merchan Rodriguez retains from him is a way of thinking — one that does not separate scientific data from belief, exactitude from intuition.

Within this eponymous series — deliberately heterogeneous, faintly disharmonic yet balanced — disparate elements come together, each bearing witness to the artist’s questions. The figure of the angel, as it existed before its Renaissance metamorphosis into a winged child — a disc, which he links to the representation of an atom’s structure. The shape of the egg, both end and beginning of a body: a mandorla, an element that is fundamentally mystical and spiritual. New age diagrams of out-of-body experiences, trance, altered states, which echo astronomical representations of the Big Bang, of the cosmos.

Found at random in the course of online wandering, drawn from encyclopedias, illuminated manuscripts, archives with no identified author, or captured by the artist himself using a thermal camera, these images are engraved or printed onto sheets of colored plastic brought back from Mexico. Sliced open, the layers of plastic reveal a rainbow — petroleum made from fossils, turned back into a chromatic spectrum.

At the center of the booth, Panmetallism revives the laboratory the artist built during his residency at Ojalá. Stacked, sun-yellowed, translucent polypropylene bins hold a bath of copper sulfate in which salvaged objects, coated in graphite paint to make them conductive, are submerged. Connected by copper wire to birds mounted as guardians above the apparatus, they oxidize at different rates depending on their material, becoming covered in a blue-green deposit — so many small clocks measuring time through transformation rather than through numbers. Copper, one of the few metals found in its native state and among the first used by humankind, becomes here an active principle.

From astronomy to alchemy, from the figure of the angel to that of the scientist, Joshua Merchan Rodriguez does not rank forms of knowledge: he sets them in dialogue within a single rectangle of matter, where scientific exactitude and popular belief together produce new narratives.