THROUGH THE VANISHING POINT

The exhibition titled Through the Vanishing Point presents the work of Eugenia Perpetua Butler (1947-2008) whose career lasted over forty years and played a formative, but often overlooked role at the border between conceptual art, community art practice and experimentations with drawings. The title of the exhibition is borrowed from one of her critical works, highlighting the importance of language in her conceptual art practice.

For PST ART 2024: Art & Science Collide, The Box is working with Butler’s daughter, Corazon del Sol, to present a selection of Butler’s pieces addressing her long-life fascination with the phenomena of transmutation and invisibility. Through the juxtapositions of rich saturated color and translucent materials Butler investigates the relationship between the physical and the imaginary. For the artist, drawing is both a tool to navigate through her personal journeys of introspection as well as a way to rearrange the viewers’ perception of the real. Her mystic landscapes animate the gallery creating a space of meditative and spiritual contemplation.

The show presents a selection of Butler’s iconographic bodies of work, including large, deeply pigmented paper-drawings hung as chapel piers on the side walls; her Journals presented in the center of the gallery as sacred texts; and her Veils hung from the ceiling above, float illuminated from behind in the back corner gallery. In a separate room, the collaborative work titled The Book of Lies will be displayed for study. This project began in 1991 and examined how other artists use “the lie to explore our relationship with the truth.” Three volumes of this mail and ephemeral art books were produced. This, like her work The Kitchen Table (1993), is an example of Butler's Social Practice presenting/collaborating with approximately 75 artists internationally. Both The Book of Lies and The Kitchen Table are impressive, reaching out to many artists and people who represent great and expansive intellectual minds.

Through a constant deconstruction of patriarchal logic, Butler’s work explores the material, emotional, artistic, and psychic labor necessary to meditate on her personal traumas. Nevertheless, her imaginaries are not limited to her personal experiences, but reach out to connect with the invisible, unexplainable and unthinkable aspects of the human condition. In her own words, she is interested in “the unknown, the psyche, the world of dreams and the unconscious.” By using her dream spaces to approach the unknown and uncertain she disrupts various structures of power. Butler's practice embraces the uncontrollable and the unimaginable, attempting to formalize paths of emancipation and transformation.

Through the Vanishing Point honors what it means to refuse to be seen, to be known, to participate when politics have prioritized recognition and visibility as a way to get access as the dominant paradigm. To be in the presence of Eugenia’s absence is to read and to make sense with her: it’s to discover some of her understanding in other time/space dimensions, to find traces of her words in other stories, to feel her pain again in other bodies. It is to avoid the extinction; certainly, it is to avoid predation.

Press Release written by Valerio del Baglio