La Lucha / The Stuggle

What is immediately notable in Salzmann’s handling of his wrestlers and weightlifters is the grace with which the struggle unfolds, the ways his figures support and hold one another physically and psychologically through the paces that their efforts put them through. The process of the struggle is a process of joining into positions of mind-body that only two together can make, and then exiting, into a communion that encompasses the stages of togetherness and apartness both. The struggle is the constantly mutating out-pressure of muscular gentleness, which is at once an expansive solemnity and a gravitized exuberance, sheltering its triumphs within itself and marking points in a journey of undisclosed transpositions, each spiriting forward a small holding-on, a tactile resolution to an ordeal made habitable, even glad. All the levels of the human soul are present—physical consciousness touching emotional consciousness touching mindful consciousness touching mind-emptying consciousness as they all meet in self-displacement toward a larger unity without assignation as body, psyche or individuated will.

The gym photographs, plus an accompanying film, became La Lucha / The Struggle, published and exhibited together with original oil paintings by a Santiago-based painter, Luis Rodríguez, aka Luis el Estudiante.