Las Pendientes

Blues arrive
By Renata Cervetto
– The gorgons meet again…
– Yes, although I like to think more that they come back to look for us, to remind us that we are playing and that the rules are changing.
– It all depends on the mask we choose to use.
– And how we adapt collectively.
It has been several years since the Argentine artist Valeria Maculan jumped from the two-dimensionality of painting to enter space in an active and purposeful way. That decision opened a new playing field that led her to experiment with new materials – fabrics, ribbons, paper, wood, wire – with which she began to create ornamental objects such as crowns, thyrsi scepters and masks. In a natural way, the body and its possibilities appear: its structure, motor skills, and its capacity for representation. In Boneless (2017), for example, we are faced with a series of overlapping fabrics that hang vertically, suspended from their upper corners, resembling inert bodies without structure that float in space at the height of the viewer. Later, regaining weight and gravity, came the Skeletons (2019) and Shields (2021), capable of being activated manually to give them movement. The ability to be another (to personify) and, at the same time, to articulate ourselves as a collective body, are aspects that run through this series of works, along with the artist's marked interest in theater, Greek tragedy, automata and literature. of Science fiction. The Gorgons (2022), however, first appeared by playing with figures cut out of paper, painted and glued. Enclosed, pushing to get out of the margins imposed by the material itself, these articulated bodies seem to float within the pictorial space.
The representation of these characters, whether three-dimensional or from the painting itself, accounts for Maculan's visual training and her dialogue with the aesthetic currents of her native country. We could imagine a layout that begins with the study of the Harlequins, large-format oil paintings that Emilio Pettoruti made in the 1920s and 1930s. These bodies disguised as musicians and minstrels, faceted by planes of color on dark or imaginary backgrounds, knew how to show their resilience against those academic volumes turned from chiaroscuro. A decade later, Juan Batlle Planas – a Catalan painter living in Argentina – would recover this pictorial language and take it towards the surrealist trends that circulated in those years in dialogue with psychoanalysis. His tempera paintings and drawings reflect strange, geometric and masked bodies, which will also be protagonists in the works of his disciple Roberto Aizenberg. Finally, the works of the artist Líbero Badíi bring us machine bodies with two or three heads, dismembered and assembled in a playful and expressive way. Although his figuration borders more on the sinister and destabilizing, his sculptures approach those more-than-human bodies that, articulated by means of screws and gears, are deployed in a forceful way.
Questions about the body and its insertion in space resonate in the search of Maculan, who back in 2008 defined himself as “a creeper,” occupying floors and walls with plastic roots and plants that grew organically during the exhibition period. That expansive and humid matter is rearticulated today in The Slopes, bluish gorgons that shed all excess and gadgets. In fact, when you look up a little, they hang from the ceiling gracefully and expectantly. Hanging irregularly, they directly challenge us in an apparent chaos that, against all odds, appears to be under control. The tension between their apparent stillness and movement invites us to travel through them without pre-established paths, to occupy their space and dance with them in that erratic coming and going that their figures propose. Perhaps the next step is to imagine what subjectivity and agency these bodies have as they take on a life of their own, and what forms these unexpected collaborations will have in the environment they decide to occupy.
Renata Cervetto
(Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1985) Curator and researcher. She has a degree in Art History from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and carried out the curatorial program at the Appel Arts Center (Amsterdam, 2013-14), she was curator of the 11th Berlin Biennial, The crack begins inside, together with Agustín Pérez Rubio, Lisette Lagnado and María Berríos.