Darío Escobar: On the Exact Nature of Our Mistakes

It’s ten in the morning, and we’ve just had coffee. Darío goes quiet after giving his answer. He thinks for a moment; then changes the subject. The way he organizes a conversation is so deliberate that I’ve come to see him as an artist who thinks in literature. He pauses for commas, uses few adjectives, and includes periods and colons in his speech. He doesn’t drift into the Lacanian jargon that so insistently appears in most exhibition texts.

For this particular exhibition, Darío Escobar has chosen ha series of works that have traveled widely, but have never been shown in his own country. The territory has expanded as many of his works have passed through several conceptual and formal explorations, while always retaining their sense of humor—one badly needed to make sense of today’s world. Here I should note that the humor in his work has been transferred from a society that had hardly reached modernity to one that is already immersed in artificial intelligence. There was never a grace period for that society: it was never prepared to understand that the present is too far to be the future, and that the future had made a 180 degree turn so everything seems to point at the horizon it left behind its back.

Still violence also makes an appearance in Dario’s works. He used to be focused on the fetishes of consumerism and the transitions of objects. Now, something else has entered the picture: perforation, accident, decay, remaking. Although the everyday violence that marks our immediate environment in Latin America emerges sequentially in his recent pieces, we should clarify that it is a globalized violence. Anglo-Saxon countries, for instance, also have their fair share of firearm Surrealism (I could even call it Sub-realism): school shootings, terrorism, no gun control, organized crime, and the uncertainty of where might World War III may begin. The simple gesture of establishing a dialogue between traces of violence and the baroque techniques used to cover a sign with gold leaf produces a very interesting outcome. Then, there are the forgotten tools; objects that—today—have been transformed into metaphors. Their disfiguration becomes necessary for them to act as triggers for thought. These are the kinds of subjects that might seem trivial in an age where screen time has become the new life of waged workers. People no longer notice that the tools being replaced still represent labor that, no matter how sanitized, still demands effort. I could go on about the “before and after” of the pandemic, about the ways in which it changed the world, the scars it left on culture, the economy, and on human relationships. It’s disheartening when critical thought fades, and the philosopher has no choice but to fall silent and let the demagogue speak. 

Fifteen years with no exhibitions in Guatemala is a very long time. With Darío we started the 2000’s with the intention of creating an international art, and art that took place in any part of the world and that would not reduce us or simplify us. We never had the intention of getting entrenched into nationalism, nor into nostalgia, nor into victimism. Making a living with our work and amplifying our horizon of possibilities; that was our route map, the one we are still following as we walk. But, as it happens with the great works of literature, there is always a return that is not being behind, but one step ahead. Our mistakes took us very far. Today, returning is also defeating memory. The exact nature of reality is that which is fleeting but is repeated each day, every day, all the time… If you are to return, you must have left before. 

Javier Payeras, Mexico City, May 2025