Nahúm Floresfrom the heart of objects to the skin of memory

by Carlos A. Lanza

Objects convoke, attract, glimpse; they are unfading

memory, perhaps the charm of an instant. Nahúm

Flores, a Honduran artist residing in Canada,

articulates a compendium of objects that, whilst facing

the vacuum often posed by the contemporary, redefine

our environmental perception: nostalgia abandons its

tone of sadness and melancholy, and reality becomes

absolutely symbolic, directing our sensibilities toward

zones that are more vital and transcendent; these

objects behave with a sense of belonging that, until

recently, was made invisible by the culture

of usefulness.

Some of the objects are part of the artist’s experiences,

and have been subjectivized according to the meaning

and significance Flores has given to them; other

objects have made their way to him by contingency

or through someone else’s generosity, in either case,

these form part of both individual and collective

memory; they are agents transmitting memory, tracks

marking destinations or intent; they are the skin of

memory: smoothness or scar, but simply human

memory in the end.

Seeing them held there in time, one perceives

fragments of an existence moving between

transcendence and the precarious: things possess the

particularity of negating or affirming. Recollections

sliding into memory may pass through fields of light

or inhabit the skin of gloomy caverns: it’s Renoir’s

brush or the torturer’s prod.

Nahúm Floresfrom the heart of objects to the skin of memory

Carlos A. Lanzatranslated by Elysa Martínez

Industry has produced the peasant’s shovel,

a mechanic’s pliers, the carpenter’s hammer, a miner’s

lamp; in short, it has produced the objects needed by

the work of a society; at the same time, however, the

industrial object has blurred the person who produces

it, thereby converting the person into a by-product

of post-industrial society. Technical improvements

have intensified production while simultaneously

generating the counterintuitive nature of existence.

When Nahúm Flores undresses these objects by

stripping them of their utilitarian guise, he leaves

behind the nudity of human effort, the primordial

intention of creating, of transforming, of feeling matter

in one’s own hands, of shaping an idea, of opening

pathways; objects touched by the mystery of their

creation–not their production–they set up within us

like extraordinary vectors of sensitivity: we travel from

the surface of those objects to the skin of memory.

Stripped of their false utilitarian brightness, the

rust of an object or its own opacity may become

renewed qualities, the texture of a distinct experience

emboldened by the desire to live, to feel, to love far

beyond things. Collecting objects to show them as

part of an anthropology of aesthetics, makes Nahúm

Flores a serious artist, one who clarifies the function

of an artistic object as a sign which opens multiple

perspectives of meaning. Flores moves toward the

object with a critical view provided, however, with

a tenderness that is moving: the dilapidated cemetery

of debris, in the hands of Nahúm Flores, can

be a warm space where memory winks its eye

at recollections calling us back to life again.

Tegucigalpa, 9 May 2016

The Inheritors Exhibition at the Museum of National IdentityTegucigalpa, Honduras 2016