The games Of memory 

By Eduardo Villar

Clarin Ñ, August 2016

The work of the Misiones artist Andrés Paredes, located in a side hall of the exhibition curated by Ana María Battistozzi, is a first space of a certain intimacy that prepares the viewer for Works that require approaching without interferences. The ¨Memorious Mud¨ installation, built in situ by Paredes using mud from Misiones, consists of four earth mountains evoking a particular trait of the province landscape. What turns it into an extraordinary experience is the encounter with its inner side. The viewer is able to go through some holes to find him/herself surrounded by an environment full of floral scents, with a setting of soft music, full of colorful butterflies, precious stones and skulls, under a stage lighting that makes distance measuring a hard task. This new universe you have just entered seems to be ruled by a different order, a different spatiality and even a different time, as if the viewer had entered the dream or psyche zone of another person.

And yet, you feel very comfortable in that foreign intimacy. Because in those memories, which belong to Paredes’s childhood, there is something of your own childhood. An something that unites us all: a longing for older times, the certainty that life is as transient as butterflies, the remembrance of those we loved and are no longer with us, the reminder that the land we step on is full of bones. Like the “Vanitas” in the Baroque, ¨Memorious Mud¨ also reminds us that we are insignificant beings and that we are going to die.