Spiritual Excuses *
by Malena Low
When Mariano Ullua looks at the fishing boats from the port of Mar del Plata—the city where he was born—and begins to construct and draw the shape of a boat with its fisherman and net to place it in a museum facing the sea, he sets off and returns, in a continuous loop, an emotional perception of the world. Even if that world is placed in parentheses, or if that perception is left with no choice but to unfold in an unequal battle over the territory of attention.
Ullua’s images are ideogrammatic, in the misunderstood, inventive, and poetic sense that Fenollosa gave to the term when he defined them as “things in motion, motion in things.” This idea was materialized plainly and without hesitation by the Argentine objectivists of the nineties, interwoven with the local reality as a way to point out a shift—of the landscape, certainly, but also of politics and aesthetic weariness. The drawings—terminal points of internal movements in which objects come into being, produce themselves, and degrade—present themselves wishing to belong to the space they occupy, laconic, deliberately insipid, and desaturated.
This insipidity does nothing more than reabsorb the exclusions of the fixed form; thus, the line that was once one thing can become another without losing its rhythm. This language—which springs from paper drawings made with a worn-out brush and continues its path through the strokes of mild iron—strives to reach clarity while remaining light, allowing us to find images at the juncture between the visible and the invisible. When the drawings take on the body of a sculpture and hold themselves in space, more angles emerge from which the object is still nothing, until we see it arise, untangling itself from its own abstraction. The effect is simple and elemental: a precarious yet necessary stance in discernment. It is not merely a matter of perceiving an image directly, but also of reclaiming a language whose anti-fantasy finds “no emotion except in things,” as paraphrased in poetry. The works take a stand in favor of a renewed understanding—a knowledge that dissolves the disaffection and cynicism that separated us from the landscape (the port, the sky, faces, work, the nation). Ultimately, Ullua takes ownership of an aesthetic that begins with that formal principle of the Fenollosian movement-image and culminates as a problem of the neoliberal landscape that the nineties generation saw solidify into a specific becoming: “no one knows where we are going, but everything mutates; everything mutates, yet the world remains untransformed.”
The penchant for objects with holes, such as nuts and keys—where the eye must do the work to distinguish the solid surface from the hollow one—finds its formal foundation in presenting the obvious and the hidden as necessarily intertwined. Things are presented not through their qualities, but through the precise edge where the void—the blank space—accentuates what exists. We come to see them in that moment between emerging and dissolving back into the less visible shifts of transformations. This inclination toward the concrete stands in tension with its opposite pole: dissipation, which is also a tendency rather than an outcome. What they hint at doing is certainly not a misguided idea of scattering those images into life. The frames in this exhibition—or rather, the drawings of frames—retain the image so that the drawing takes responsibility for its own artisticity, activating the flow of the gaze and a stance toward denotation.
Simple shapes recall their own fullness and perfection, like stars or uppercase print letters. However, the raw and degraded manner in which Mariano Ullua handles them undermines the idea that fullness coincides with completeness. Rather, fullness exists to be developed, as in sketches, where the unfinished work leads us to contemplate how much of its effect is yet to unfold. In a far from obvious way, these works demand more labor and effort from us. The composition of a sky that reads HELP! is a caricature of its own image, of its burden of perfection; a mockery of the fact that everything we could demand from it is not there to be handed to us. Furthermore, I would say all these drawings are triangulated by caricature and cartoons, which carry within themselves both a drive toward the most essential perfection and the need to ridicule that very drive. Something that enters visibly degraded remains animated and expanding, counter to all circumstantial thoughts and feelings that suggest an exasperating retraction. The map of Latin America in the room reminds us that the reduction of history and the world is not an inescapable fate—that times and debates resume differently every time. And while this idea is serious, the caricaturesque accent drains away any dead weight of iconographic silliness, such as the kind a map on a coffee mug might carry.
If the general movement of the economy, borders, meaning, attention, and feelings—if everything tends toward abstraction—it is not unusual to reopen debates around denotation or, put differently, around the impression of the concrete consequences of these increasingly abstract processes. Perhaps it is worth mentioning that the last ones to do this programmatically were proto-Kirchnerist artists, or straightforward militants, who had the State as an interlocutor for their aesthetic searches. The works in Spiritual Excuses refer to these discussions in a subtle way, beyond the simplicity their style appears to show, focusing on a primary experience with a sense of humor—which is to say, with a note that resonates in the lightness of the material.
* The present text was written by Malena Low for Mariano Ullua’s exhibition Spiritual Excuses, which opened on Friday, August 14, 2026, at Ohno Gallery. The works featured in the exhibition were produced at PROA21 as part of the annual residency program.