Getting to Know the Work of Jorge Bafico

Ricardo Botana | UyArtistas

A psychoanalyst in practice since 1993, Doctor of Psychology, educator, and writer, Jorge Bafico becomes an artist through a decisive and painful event in his life. The death of his son Benjamín plunges him into a difficult period that, as a form of catharsis, ultimately triggers creative processes resulting in his book So Close to Shining, which in turn inspired and led to the creation of a series of forty artworks that form part of his exhibition Generations.

Bafico works with fish, though also with elephants and guitars, as if the inevitable course were a constant flow through an existence charged with unexpected occurrences, liquid and crystalline, slipping through his fingers without the possibility of containment.

There is no fixed constant in his work, even when it may appear otherwise, and certainly no emptiness. Everything is laden with signifiers that feed a burdened yet sincere mode of expression: an incoherent plea of old memories gathered into an unexpected and painful ending that also marks the beginning of new questions and paths. Wood, metal, textures, and colors, orderly yet disjointed, summarize a determined stance toward giving aesthetic form to sensations that outwit suffering, filling an inner, strident silence with art. Perhaps the use of cold metal also reveals an urgent need to remove heat from thought and feeling.

Discarded materials, fragments joined and resignified to compose his work, also reassemble his life and attempt to reposition it toward a future that must continue to be traversed. Psychology, his lifelong field, undoubtedly guides and focuses this act of creating in order to go on living. Deeply compelling and far from conventional, Bafico’s work shows us that art is an experience without limits, one that undeniably helps us live.

Work from the assemblage series “Fish.”