UNFOLD / DUPLICATE is a work that remedies the poverty today’s post-philosophical and/or super-aesthetic works of art suppose. We find objects here. A web of rolled rubber bands leaning on a wall, a model of acrylic cubes, as a topographic allusion centrally placed on the gallery floor. A red shoe of beads on a box of electronic devices; a small plasma screen in the back of the gallery in which a self-portrait of the artist in different angles in circular movements can be seen. All the elements are eventual objects in the work of Mahaluf, in the mode of “residues” (the rolled rubber web); and performatic objects: one as a momentary “substitute” (the rigid surface the –now- residual acrylic cube model supposes), and the other as an objectual performatic “extension” (the red bead shoe missing in Mahaluf’s previous inventory of objects and performatic clothing). These are all performatic objects. A question that is confirmed in the instructive of reading that the self-portrait constitutes on the wall in the back of the gallery. At any moment in which we relate to the self-portrait, we instantly realize its sequence repeating itself to the point in which we begin to witness the screen. We only realize at the end of the route, once we suppose the installation as a staging of objects. What there really is at play is the performativity of the objects in a situation of resting, in other words, of a moment of inflection in the movement of the work. What we see is nothing but the mode in which the objects escape us from the conceptual freezing of things. And there lays the importance of the instruction manual the self-portrait supposes, as the new objectual element, but at the same time, as the philosophical question that has been operating forever in the work of Sebastian Mahaluf, to put the discerning nature of the spectator with the works of art to play. 

*Extract text from "Last / First" by Juan Francisco Garate