Carlos Kusnir

Carlos Kusnir was born in 1947 in Buenos Aires (AR), he lives and works between Marseille and Paris (FR)

“Matches, façades, and paintings.
In ornaments, I find rhythms and melodies that speak to me.
In Saint-Nazaire, we built large wooden structures that I filled with silkscreen-printed patterns.
I call them façades, maybe for convenience, but in reality, I’m not only thinking about the house. The house is the anecdote, the detail beneath which there is a presence.
I am mostly thinking about the presence that an image can leave behind. Like when we look at someone’s face… the face.
I often look at paintings as if they were faces.
Where are these faces? Where do we find them?

The façades I showed outdoors are shapeless forms blending into the landscape. They are forced, condemned to dialogue with the landscape.
(It’s not an illness—it’s the cure!)

It’s not the same for sketches or paintings. It’s rare to come across a painting by chance. For a painting, we take the bus, we get off the subway, and we walk into a gallery or a museum.
With the façades, I wanted them to stand between the pedestrian and the landscape, to ambush the passerby.

In exhibition spaces, we look at one painting, then another. We glance at the whole display, and then we talk about the hanging.

And I wonder (because we talk a lot about hanging) whether what we’re really trying to do is to feel a sense of the whole—
a sensation that exists when painting is connected to other situations, to other places.”

— Carlos Kusnir, 2001

Carlos Kusnir’s work in on display during the exhibition Carlos Kusnir, 2018.