Sebastián Gordín: Inventory

For his latest solo show at Galeria Oscar Cruz, Sebastián Gordin (b. 1969, Buenos Aires) created works departing from the association between the practices of invention and inventory, which he observes in his own studios practice. Actually, in Portuguese, the etymology of the words “inventory” and “invention” is similar: both of them derives from the Latin word “invenire”, which means to find while searching and, at the same time, to continue to search.

Departing from his personal experience of an artist who creates his body of work through the association of collected and found objects, Gordin breaks with the current dichotomy between two words from the same family, one associated to creative liberty, the other to bureaucratic boredom. The artist states that “when I arrive at my studio, the first thing I do is to arrange it and arrange again, so I’ll have in front of me a world of accumulated objects, books, memories, tools and images. Only then, when I look at all that which inhabits my studio, everything that I distractedly collected just because I liked its shape, its colour and its function in the world of real things, these objects become a part of my production”.