Up until the 20th century, and ever since myths sought to explain what reason could not comprehend, chaos always occupied the place of an enigma. In the middle of the past century various scientific studies began to include the unforeseeable as part of rational thought.
Thereafter, instability and indeterminacy were seen as key factors beyond states of equilibrium. This paradigm shift became a part of the passage from modernity to postmodernity.
In 1965, in his book Antiestética [Anti-Esthetics], Luis Felipe Noé expressed the need to embrace chaos, not in opposition to order, but as a new dynamic for the functioning of a world in permanent flux. In pace with scientific thought, the artist was henceforth to include chaos in his theory and practice.
This exhibition analyzes the central aspects of Noé's body of work, through which he developed his “esthetics of chaos,” in which the past echoes in the present and projects itself toward the future. For this reason we've titled it Mirada prospectiva [Forward Gaze], since his work presents an ongoing obsession with unraveling all that is evolving.
Our curatorial plan departs from chronological order – breaking with the traditional approach of a retrospective – and lays out three keys to interpretation that can be traced in Noé's "esthetics of chaos" throughout his artistic production between 1957 and 2017: historical consciousness, fragmented vision and the vital line.
The three constants structuring the show can be found condensed into the impressive installation Entreveros [Messes] (2017), which presents an image of collapse, at moments in which the spiral of chaos flares up once more before our eyes.