Instructions for a photographic reproduction (traced) - Chandelier (traced) by Louise Lawler, 2001 / 2007 / 2013, Oil on canvass, 101.5 x 75.3 cm, 2022

The Dr. said: "What is new in Guadalajara is old in CDMX and what is new in CDMX is old in NY..." - 'Untitled (Imperfect)' by Kendell Geers, 2011, Wall watches, digital print on steel, 48 x 76 x 3 cm, 2022

III. The infinite gallop - Gattamelata (previously Monument to Unknown Hero) by Erbossyn Meldibekov, 1999-2007, Fiberglass, rose quartz, plastic, 43 x 40 x 150 cm, 2022

It is never filiations which are important but alliances, alloys; these are not successions, lines of descent, but contagions, epidemics, the wind.

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Gilles Deleuze

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No work is reducible to the work of a single artist. What is individual authorship but a set of imaginaries and consensuses that only exists by erasing the multiple actors that allow it? The raw material with which any discourse is built is a shared good, and the "new" is always erected in company. The constant exercise of references that create artistic practice places us in a zone labyrinthic and rhizomatic, without clear beginnings or ends. Being inscribed in social relations, artworks are viscous, capable of incorporating elements that adhere to their future and cause dialogue that alter them to make them speak unexpected languages.

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In 2007 Jonathan Lethem published an essay titled The Ecstasy of Influence, in which he explained how ideas have been shared, recycled, stolen, reinterpreted and copied since ancient times. Lethem argues that art is made of appropriations from previous manifestations and that the concept of absolute originality is a myth. Within this labyrinth of correspondences, Marek Wolfryd's exhibition —borrowing its name from Lethem's essay—is navigated as a hyperlink. The approach of each of his pieces always leads us to another work, which precedes it. The archipelago character of every object, its condition as a whole, the impossibility of its existence in the void. Thus, an Ionic carved stone column is updated by entering into a relationship with an inflatable plastic that imitates it; the legs of a horse invoke an equestrian statue from five hundred years ago; a lobby welcomes us with two clocks that simultaneously situate and transport us: the past infiltrates contemporaneity and finds new ways of manifesting. Remakes of remakes, pieces that "seem familiar to us", and in that memory they are transformed into others, with replaced objects, tropicalized, displaced. With gestures like this, these works that are capable of, as Sara Uribe said, manufacturing present with materials from other temporalities.

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It is common to surround artistic works with a magical or devotional aura that makes invisible the production relation in which they are inserted; this illusion —or fetishization— makes us see them as independent entities and value them only for their aesthetic qualities, their irreplaceable "purity" or their "originality", and we tend to forget the social character of the work that produces them. The exhibition, in addition to bearing witness to the commercial transaction processes that had to take place for the works to be exhibited here and now —as can be read in the pieces datasheets—, exposes various dialogues with other artists, and questions the original idea of creation of the solitary author who elaborates unconnected and autonomous pieces.

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The systems of influence, appropriation and collective authorship have existed for thousands of years and have gone from enjoying a healthy relationship to being considered practices worthy of punishment, according to the cultural conventions and codes of the time. Marek Wolfryd shamelessly shows us that in contemporary art it is common that the pieces are not made by the artist himself and are others —a set of Chinese companies, in this case—who execute the "idea". We must not forget that as merchandise, a work is subject to geographical displacement, power dynamics and economic relations, so that in artistic practice it is also revealed how the capitalist model operates, characterized by outsourcing labor.

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The exercise of reproducing what has already been reproduced introduces the possibility of an infinite process of transfer and remixing of materials similar to what happened with ancient palimpsests: manuscripts that preserved the traces of a previous text that had been altered to be able to write again on the same surface. The infinity of layers that any artistic manifestation carries brings us closer to the meaning of the word "copy", which in Latin means "abundance". And the encounter with the infinite in any of its manifestations can cause restlessness, but how stimulating is what it stirs!

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Valeria Mata