The artistic practice of Miguel Rothschild (Buenos Aires, 1963) delves into the tensions between the sacred and the profane, the sublime and the fragile, the devotional and the ironic. From Berlin, where he has lived for three decades, he has developed a language in which everyday materials—shattered glass, nylon, pins, fishing lines, confetti, crystal diamonds—are transformed into vehicles of the numinous, into visual paradoxes that destabilize perception and complicate the aesthetic experience.

As Walter Benjamin recalled, "There is no document of culture that is not at the same time a document of barbarism." He also warned that, upon leaving the churches and entering museums, religious images lost their liturgical function but retained their cultural value. It is at this threshold that Rothschild stands: he does not seek to restore the lost faith, but rather to activate a visual memory laden with displaced symbols, with remnants, with a retreating aura.

The exhibition "Happy Are Those Who Believe Without Having Seen" deploys this tension in a group of works that reactivate the symbolic power of the sacred through material, visual, and poetic strategies. In Lo Numinoso, the transparency and vibration of fishing lines stretched over photographic paper condense the search for the invisible, the intuition of a presence that cannot be shown but only insinuated. This same fragility appears in Absolution, where photographs of confessionals transformed into precision games with steel balls transform the rite of repentance into chance and repetition. The violence of the image paradoxically opens a horizon of redemption: the wound becomes a path to liberation.

Excerpt from the text by Iñaki Martínez Antelo Iñaki Martínez Antelo