Guade Estienne, Pilar Saracini, Juan Gálvez
Curator: Catalina Bagnato Irigoyen
July 10 – August 5, 2026
Opening: Friday, July 10, 7 pm
Cassia House presents As If by Magic, a collective exhibition by Guade Estienne, Pilar Saracini and Juan Gálvez, curated by Catalina Bagnato Irigoyen, proposing a journey through the intersection of art, artificial intelligence, digital image and contemporary sensitivity.
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The exhibition begins with an urgent question: what happens when artificial intelligence starts to dispute the territory of imagination. In a present where images circulate, transform and are produced at an unprecedented speed, the show is situated at the point where visual creation becomes a field of tension between the human, the technical and the artificial.
The present we inhabit pushes us to coexist every day with a new image-generating agent: artificial intelligence floods our visual culture and our gaze, listens to our requests, and “creates” by reformulating what is already known. In this way, the visual world that surrounds us begins to be defined by recurring formal patterns that give rise to a homogeneous and standardized aesthetic. All images begin to share a similar light; all faces smile in the same way.
As Crary aptly explains, vision is a historical beast: we learned to see the way we see. That is why today we must ask ourselves: what images are overloading our retinas? What are we becoming accustomed to seeing? Artificial intelligence becomes the devoted mother of a visual language that seeks to appear “natural” or “realistic”: clear, simple, easily understood, and without any evident trace of its humble creator to the untrained eye.
As artists and cultural mediators, we must not ignore these images, but rather ask ourselves once again what place we should occupy within this new field of visual culture. The works by the artists brought together here force the viewer to move away from the comfort of this virtual, prefabricated visual space and confront what seems to be increasingly hidden: the decisions behind creation, the subjective imprint upon reality.
It is in this world, where “creating” and “consuming” images that come from invisible hands seems inevitable, that the magic trick takes on new relevance. The artists in this exhibition confront us with a reminder that the constant, washed-out flow of images seems determined to make us forget: every work, every painting, every image, every magic trick implies the presence of a magician. These artists put on the top hat and remind us that every image is, ultimately, an act of magic: an artifice.
- Catalina Bagnato Irigoyen
The works brought together in the exhibition construct a territory shaped by painting, visual fiction and artifice. Within this intersection, the image appears as a surface of desire, suspicion and transformation: a space where matter, gesture, simulation and technology coexist as possible ways of thinking about the sensitivity of our time.
Together, As If by Magic proposes an experience where imagination is placed in dialogue with new forms of visual production, opening a journey in which each work activates a question about the present, perception and the contemporary ways in which images are constructed.
