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Forms of Being Human: Paintings and Drawings by Ernesto Deira (1961–1966)

MC Galería is pleased to invite you to its new exhibition, Forms of Being Human: Paintings and Drawings by Ernesto Deira (1961–1966), opening on Tuesday, June 3 at 6:00 PM. This show presents a selection from the artist’s most experimental period, during which he explored bold and provocative new ways of representing the human figure—intensely figurative works marked by vibrant materiality and defiant gesture. The exhibition is accompanied by a wall text written by Isabel Plante.

Featuring works made between 1961 and 1966, these creatures—somewhere between the recognizable and the unreadable—confront us with images that seem to emerge from an emotional magma: distorted faces, fragmented bodies, eyes in hands, heads with no precise contours. Many of the works are untitled, preserving the indeterminate power of the human in a state of transformation. As Isabel Plante notes, “Drawings and paintings reinforce each other in their specificities, while also converging as forms of being human—that is, as mediums through which Deira explored figuration in a vital and multifaceted way.”

Forms of Being Human: Paintings and Drawings by Ernesto Deira (1961–1966) offers a journey through the aesthetic and conceptual investigations of an artist who, through painting and drawing, broke the boundaries of the representable to show us that—even in chaos and distortion—there is a profound affirmation of the human.

Fancy Monas

The Fancy Monas are a series of 25 works created by Edgardo Giménez, where pop art meets technology. Drawing from over 100 elements of his visual universe — colors, objects, shapes, characters — Giménez used algorithmic tools to breathe new life into them.

The result is a collection of unique, vibrant, and humor-filled pieces that reimagine his work through a contemporary lens. The Fancy Monas open new pathways for artistic creation, blending the manual with the digital, the playful with the experimental.

¡Jugar es cosa seria!

Playing is also a serious matter!

In 1984, Manuel Espinosa participated in the exhibition El juguete (The Toy), a group show that brought together well-known artists to create toys. For this, Espinosa created Juego de la Matusa, a stacking game made of yellow, blue, red, and green acrylic pieces. Ingeniously and sensitively, he used geometric rationality to create a visual construction device that invites the viewer to engage in an open formal experiment.

The relationship between art and play has numerous precedents throughout the history of art, with many artists linking play to artistic practices to foster creativity or stimulate the imagination. From the toys created by Joaquín Torres García and the esoteric game invented by Xul Solar to the central role of participatory experiences in the playful environments of the 1960s, Playing is also a serious matter! proposes a playful approach to art. It is an exhibition composed of a selection of works that center their investigations around play and playful exploration: from participatory proposals that directly engage the viewer’s experience, toys as objects produced by renowned artists, and a body of works that refer to the imaginary of childhood.

Hans-Georg Gadamer presents play as an elemental function of human life, to the point where one could not think of human culture without a playful component. Through play, we learn to share, experience, create, solve problems, and connect with others. Some of the essential aspects of play, as pointed out by Gadamer, include playing-with, a repeating movement, and a particular inclusion of reason, where everything is ordered as if it had a purpose. However, play turns out to be a free rationality with no other aim beyond the play itself.[1]

In a similar way to Juego de la Matusa, Rogelio Polesello’s acrylics propose a playful activity focused on participation and playing-with the visitors, the surrounding space, and the works displayed here. The concave and convex forms of his carved pieces alter perception through the movement or change in the viewer’s angle of vision, generating an optical game of transformation. Polesello makes us move back and forth, repeating a motion that resolves itself in the play space. On the other hand, Ernesto Ballesteros uses constant, repeated movement, slightly choreographed, to create his drawings from play and the participation of others. As if having a purpose, Ballesteros organizes the movement with which he constructs these enormous tangles of pink and yellow threads, with no other goal than the freedom of creative experimentation. His drawings highlight the value of play as a tool for creation and reflection.

The universe of toys also emerged in the production of Luis F. Benedit, a renowned conceptual artist who focused on exploring the connections between art and science. Through the childlike drawings of Tomás, his five-year-old son, Benedit approached the world of toys. In this series of works, the artist included his son’s drawings – from a policeman to the bride of King Kong – and his own reinterpretation of the drawings as a projective design, which he then brought into three-dimensional objects.

Some toys are created from their own universe, while others are built from shared fantasies. Many games and toys belong to specific eras, marking generational milestones, while others remain relevant over time. In Giménez, an artist who navigated various genres – painting, sculpture, architecture, graphic design – marked by joy and pop beauty, we find a universe of fantasy and childhood imagination in his work. Clouds, monkeys, cats, rabbits, among others, are recurring elements in his art, as well as the green labyrinths included in this exhibition. Like the labyrinthine gardens of European palaces, Giménez constructed green geometric walls, streets, and crossroads that invite his characters to play at getting lost and finding the way out.

In Pop Folklórico, Cynthia Cohen gathers various objects on a small altar: from a book of Frida Kahlo next to one of Barbie, a Hawaiian doll with her arms wide open, to a small toy horse. All these memories are stacked between stars and bright bows tied with light blue ribbon against a pink background. In this small altar, elements of cultural consumption, souvenirs, and childhood toys coexist on the same level, configuring the artist’s universe.

Dino Bruzzone, on the other hand, explores and dives into the imagination of other generations and childhoods. His most recent work consists of large paintings with bright flat colors, crossed by the offset dot pattern, representing images from a comic strip from the early 20th century. Krazy Kat is a strip created by George Herriman that was published in American newspapers from 1913 to 1944, blending innocence, surrealism, and a certain romanticism in its images and plot. The strip centers on the adventures of Krazy Kat, who is in love with the mouse Ignatz, but his love is unrequited.

Finally, Fernando Brizuela also takes childhood dolls like Hulk and King Kong to create a true bestiary. These dolls – sold in toy stores for children and personifying strength and power – transform in Brizuela’s hands into monsters, creatures with sharp teeth, crazed eyes, and uncontrollable strength in their hands. This aggressive gesturality is covered with marijuana, creating a strange transfiguration of the characters between the human, animal, and vegetal. With irony, these monsters seem to expose a prejudice, a fear possibly constructed from misinformation and arbitrariness. Also part of his production are botanical watercolors that recall the records of 19th-century traveling painters made during expeditions.

The universe of play, toys, and fantasies are important matters, not only because they present themselves as a possible antidote to the rigidity of routine and daily life, but also due to their transformative relevance for our experience in the world.

Ayleén Vázquez


[1] Hans-Georg, The Relevance of the Beautiful. Art as Play, Symbol, and Festival. Barcelona: Paidós, 2002.



Selected Artists: Manuel Espinosa, Rogelio Polesello, Edgardo Giménez, Luis F. Benedit, Ernesto Ballesteros, Cynthia Cohen, Fernando Brizula, and Dino Bruzzone

Curatorship: Agustina Espinosa, Bárbara Espinosa, and Ayelén Vázquez.

Fuzz | Juan Becú

Distort, destroy, and start over.

For this exhibition, Juan Becú (Buenos Aires, 1980) looks back at the landscape he has built over 25 years of work, reconnecting with his traces, remains, milestones, and disappointments in order to analyze the processes he has gone through in the search for his poetics. Although he has explored alternative paths such as sculpture, drawing, video, and performance, painting has always been the guiding force, imposing its own logic. Time and again, it has been killed and resurrected in this century, but Becú has remained loyal, even when the attention of the art world shifted to other contemporary languages. However, the relationship is not ideal; it could be described as a sort of Stockholm Syndrome. Each day they spend together in the studio leaves him completely exhausted and anxious for the reunion the next day. The bond is tortuous and filled with constant confrontations; it is only possible through debate: when one proposes an idea, the other automatically contradicts it; when it seems like an agreement is within reach, one of them throws everything overboard and they start over. Detachment from images proves to be the most exhausting challenge. The impossibility of citing or maintaining a motif as a narrative axis gives way to emotion, sensitivity, and spirituality to take the lead in decision-making. Thus, the images evolve amidst these disputes; if a figure longs to appear, the material demands a gesture that covers it partially or completely. If the oil paint seeks to wander anarchically, it will be forced to suggest silhouettes that will later blend with other brushstrokes on the canvas. Color becomes a hostage, predominant in its presence but always adrift, influenced by gestures and moods. A color that dominates the composition one day may disappear the next, drowned by the emergence of new tensions.

In his series of drawings “Genomanías,” he tries to offer a break for thought, aiming for an informal and carefree automatism. He seeks to suppress conscious control by working quickly, freeing his hand on the paper and restricting the color palette. However, painting will intervene, demanding that layers of oil pastels be added to veil and conceal. In an act of resistance, Becú will partially remove them to reveal fragments of the initial proposals.

In sculpture, he will attempt, unsuccessfully, to escape the intensity of that relationship. But painting will remain present, guiding his hand with techniques that are intrinsic to its history. Forms begin to emerge through the accumulation of plaster on wooden and iron structures. It is a process similar to how sandcastles are built by dripping: pouring the wet mixture with the hand, letting it slip through the fingers, sedimenting, and creating cavities and interior spaces. A volumetric dripping with the haphazard vigor of Abstract Expressionism and the introspective, melancholic subjectivity of Informalism.

It is in music where Juan finds a space that has not allowed painting to infiltrate. It is a social space, linking him to other musicians and audiences. Yet, it will be the discipline that provides him with one of the keys to understanding his practice in the visual arts. His brushstrokes, like guitar chords distorted by fuzz, break the conventional harmony, opening the way to a more experimental and emotional dimension. If fuzz distorts pure sound, Becú, through the layering of colors, forms, and gestures, generates tensions between order and chaos, between representation and abstraction. In both cases, the result is an intense sensory experience that stimulates new perceptions in both the listener and the viewer.

Joaquín Rodríguez

Hotel de Paso, Oscar Bony

Orientation is a Transit Hotel
Santiago Villanueva

*

Orientation is one of the words that best guides me through the various moments of Oscar Bony’s work (1941-2002). It involves tilting to one side and then the other, akin to the sensation at the start of a fall and, instantly, regaining stability. This sense of flirtation, of insinuating oneself, of presenting without development, was a commentary for each moment: tendency is the most contradictory place to inhabit, but also the one suited to a voice that can be intensified. Bony saw minimalism, conceptualism, painting, and photography in this way. For each moment, avant-garde also meant evading the idea of a personal style.

*

Bony spoke about discontinuity in his work, of a fragment of discontinuity. He salvaged the possibility of not choosing, of remaining in a state of doubt, of not advancing, of proposing and stopping. In this sense, his production leaned towards a passive idea of avant-garde, where reaching the point of intensity and concept was simultaneously the moment to abandon: to sink in many directions at once. He said that this same sensation was what Buenos Aires produced in him: a Spanish house, a French building, one from the 50s modernism, a postmodern one. He defined it as a jumble. He likely took something from Luis Felipe Noé’s concept of “chaos.” “I was a romantic fool who thought he was in Fontainebleau. The photos I show really move me; that helpless, skinny, angry boy is Bony,” he says in an interview with Julio Sanchez in 1993. His words contrast with the certainty of his work’s development in the late 80s and 90s. The precision of the shots, the objective conceptualization in some of his appearances, contrasts with the return to an idealized and romanticized image of the artist, embracing and thinking around death and, above all, suicide.

*

When Marcelo Pacheco began his text for Bony’s exhibition catalog at Malba, he said: “I try to orient myself.” It seems like a beginning from the haze of never reaching a conclusion or a clear hypothesis, a certainty that identifies an extensive body of work spanning several decades, as a whole or a coherence. I would like to consider here, in the same vein, his work as an incoherent ensemble, which also leads me to affirm avant-garde as disappointment. I also think that the ability to orient oneself and disorient oneself was in Bony a possibility to invent a method. The works from the last years of his life allow me to reveal something of this method and rethink his work from previous decades.

Orientation can sometimes mean arriving at a concrete material, a word, or simply a repeated action. In Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006), Sara Ahmed asks: “What does it mean to be oriented? How do we begin to know or feel where we are, or even where we are going, aligning ourselves with the characteristics of the territories we inhabit, the sky around us, or the imaginary lines that traverse maps? How do we know which way to turn to reach our destination?” These are all questions organic to Bony, from the geographical coordinates of a sky to the intention of finding an objective sense to his practice under the necessity of allowing new beginnings. Ahmed talks about the familiar as a way of feeling space and how it imprints on bodies. Bony had worked on this sense in some of his 60s projects, approaches between conceptualism and minimalism, but always focused on understanding a space. The familiar is the configuration of the effect of experience, which measures the reach and contact with objects. Approaching is a way of reorienting the familiar. Ahmed also speaks of migration as a process of disorientation and reorientation, something that could extend beyond Bony’s work to the movements or displacements between the different cities he lived in or visited, emphasizing the idea of travel as a permanent state in the formation and opening of an artist. This displacement of bodies coming and going determines ways of inhabiting and thinking about spaces. Movement or migration is the sensation of what is unstable, and in that sense, Bony’s work could be considered, beyond geographic location, as a migratory practice. Ahmed refers to that space that falls: “When something is out of alignment, it is not just that the thing seems oblique, but that the world itself may seem tilted, which disorients the image and even displaces the body.” In a 1984 work, Bony had already tilted the plane of a painted sky, which from the lower right corner was attached by a thread to a small boat. He did the same in a series of works from 1992 and 1993, titled Memory Series, where the uses of photography appear through enlargement, manipulation, and staging with another series of objects. For Bony, photography was always the space of greatest security for disorientation, for losing oneself. Orientation is a transit hotel. Bony viewed artistic practice as a transit hotel and the artist as a “visitor-artist,” where there is no sense of belonging.

*

The short film Submarino Amarillo, which Bony filmed in 1965, evokes something of the dizziness inherent in being disoriented. A group of young people, including Pablo Suárez, Roberto Jacoby, and his little cousin, run naked along the beaches of Villa Gesell without an apparent destination, merely as a simple game among their bodies that evokes carefree behavior and adolescent eroticism. Nature reappears in many images of Bony’s work: in his well-known skies from the 70s, but also in works like Still Life (1996) and The Spiderweb (c. 1998), where shots are made on photographs of landscapes, possibly from Corrientes or Misiones. The image of the spiderweb appears, which can be thought of not only for this image but for all the Suicides and Executions. Contemplation of Absence 3 (1997) presents again a beach landscape, where the silhouettes of three people appear. Bony intervenes in the image with perforations with velvet backgrounds, creating a zigzagging line across the sky, confirming his hypothesis that Lucio Fontana’s slashes should have been horizontal, like the line of the Pampas horizon. Bony’s work is filled with punctuation marks constantly reconfiguring the image, annoying it and making it more receptive.

*

In 1959, Franco Di Segni, an artist and disciple of Enrique Pichon-Rivière, published a very particular book for thinking about the relationship between psychoanalytic culture and the analysis of a work of art. In Death and Destruction of a Sammer Makarius Painting, Di Segni intervenes the canvas from the perspective of analytical pressure, from the insistence on turning it around, looking again: ruining it with the eyes. I think of this book, this method, to look again at Bony. Interpretation, awareness, the construction of a coherence network is what traverses a gesture; not the shot, not the perforation, not the dot. Di Segni proposed to a group of people to meet periodically to find other possible interpretations in a Makarius canvas that would detach it from aspects related to the tradition and code of art history. The insistence on the image allowed approaching the same place with different words, where collective experience took a different form over time. The aim was to try out a vocabulary that projects a perforation and traverses the commonplace where the work might remain.

A shot marks a distance between what the artist decides to do and what it can provoke. A distance between intention and mark. The “important” space in Bony’s shootings and suicides is the trajectory of the projectile. The edge is not the frame but the fact that works can be thought of from the inside out. The center of the image, where the bullet perforates, is the edge, and the limits of the work are its centers. In the plural, because they variably build the possibility of containing spatial, formal, economic, and class information. The missing part is that edge, the perforation. What disappears from the image is a point, which does not alter a possible reading, only impacts interpretations. Bony distracts us with the possible metaphorical readings that repetition produces when viewing his work; the literalness generates a pause, a break, to think of all possible strategies to escape it. The viewer who arrives at a personal reading is the one who forgets the action and effect to focus on the distance.

*

In a 1994 interview with Hernan Ameijeiras, Bony confesses that he was affected by the death of Liliana Maresca, which occurred that same year, despite not being very close friends or frequenting common spaces much. Bony photographed her funeral, which was like a performance, as a tribute. Maresca had died after being HIV-positive and facing a fragile state of health in the last years of her life. It was a year before Bony began creating his Suicides and Executions and the same year that Miguel Harte created the work Surface Aspirators: an aluminum sheet with a Formica surface around it, with about six holes from which small drops of polyester resin oozed. Harte’s perforations on aluminum coincide with Bony’s perforations on glass and photography, though the former’s imagery later focused on the hole as an entry and exit space, with a more sexual than violent tint, like small gloryholes of fantasies.

*

In 1996, Federico Klemm dedicated one of his episodes of El banquete telemático to the exhibition Fusilamientos y suicidios curated by Bony at his Foundation. Klemm, amidst hurried and interrupted descriptions, refers to the attire of the characters in the work La familia obrera from 1968: “All classes dress up as best they can for a social event, just as the working masses celebrated Perón or when they faced the Russian czar, and even more so to present themselves in public, which does not distort their social identity.” Klemm connects moments, focusing more on the surface of things, which is why he takes risks. Suddenly he says, “A weapon in the hands of a fool can turn them into a murderer, a weapon in the hands of an artist can produce a creative act.” He then looks at the camera, aims, and fires, breaking the lens and simulating the action of Bony himself. Once seated in the “private” lounge, Bony confesses that “one needs to feel like a child to do tremendous things,” reflecting on the idea of judgment and his works as a product of the times: “In a disintegrating society, in a century’s end coming too fast, it seems necessary to end the postmodern, to end the light, and to assert.” “Well, the light is almost over…” replies Klemm. “Fortunately,” concludes Bony. That same year, in the catalog of the Bienal del Mercosur, he referred to the impacts of his shots: “As it’s broken, so it remains.” Bony’s actions are precise, but also impossible to conceal; each shot is an indelible mark on the work.

A year later, in 1997, when he created La barrita de Quilmes and La familia del barrio, it seems he is aiming at his own working-class family. It is almost a repentance, a shooting at the very gesture of past decades, where the feelings of humiliation and abuse of power appear, as Pacheco points out. That year, the rooms of the Centro Cultural Recoleta inaugurated an exhibition that also, but in a different way, closed a decade full of dire consequences for our lives, which would become even more apparent in the years to come. It was Jorge Gumier Maier’s El tao del arte, opening as Bony completed this series of shootings that imprinted new meanings onto his previous work, like an ouroboros gradually stopping and abandoning its motion.

Luis Fernando Benedit

Visual artist, architect and designer. His work is part of the main currents of the second half of the 20th century in our country, especially the emergence of conceptual art and its offshoots. His main themes are, firstly, the link between art and science, which allows him an anthropological investigation centred on the analysis of behaviour conditioned by the environment; then, the work on the paradigms of the construction of nationality and the quotations both from local plastic production and from the journeys of the naturalists who explored Patagonia.since childhood he has been inclined towards drawing, design and caricature. He entered the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Buenos Aires in 1956. He graduated in 1963 with an award-winning project. At the same time he began his career as a painter. His first exhibitions place him in the transition from an initial informalism towards a neo-figuration with images not exempt from critical humour: El candidato, Prócer federal, among others in his exhibition Nuevos rostros, presented in 1961 at the Galería Lirolay. There he experimented with the combination of oil and enamel.

In 1963 he moved to Madrid, where he continued to work both in architecture and painting. The latter changes towards an expression close to pop, made up of synthetic forms and flat tones. In 1966 he exhibited at the Galería Europe. He returns to the country and creates, together with Vicente Marotta, the setting Barba Azul, for the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires, combining volumetric enamels on sheet metal and sound settings, with Marotta’s sculptures in enamelled cement. After exhibiting at the Rubbers Gallery in 1967, he moved with his family to Rome, where he received a scholarship to study landscape architecture. He also produces painted acrylic objects. His interests extend to biology and the possibility of incorporating living organisms into his works.

He returns to Buenos Aires in 1968, where he continues his work as an architect and plastic artist. He presents in the exhibition Materiales. Nuevas técnicas. Nuevas expresiones, at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, his first artificial habitat. This was followed by the exhibition Microzoo, at the Rubbers Gallery, where he exhibited various habitats for plants, animals and insects – bees, fish, turtles, ants, cats. The interest in these works is the analysis of behaviours and their external, artificial and cultural conditioning: the opposition between nature and culture; the gesture, the demarcation of the artistic territory, and the appropriation of materials and techniques from biology, with a discourse that transgresses the purity of the postulates of the experimental sciences, to become sociological and philosophical.

In 1969 he took part in the exhibition Arte y cibernética, organised and curated by Jorge Glusberg to exhibit computer designs – his work with this critic and curator would continue over the years. In 1970, at the Venice Biennale, he presented one of his best-known habitats: the Biotron, with the collaboration of the scientists Antonio Battro and José Núñez, and Glusberg himself.

In 1971 he took part in the exhibition Arte de sistemas, a prelude to the conceptualist deployment of a group that was about to be formed: the Grupo de los 13, led by Glusberg at the CAYC. He was part of this group from the first exhibition, Hacia un perfil del arte latinoamericano, in 1972, to the last, Grupo CAYC in Santiago de Chile, in 1994, and in Arte de sistemas (1971) he exhibited his Laberinto invisible (Invisible Labyrinth), in which the spectator circulates along a route regulated by a set of mirrors, sensors and sound alarms. In 1972 he was invited to hold a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. There he presented the Phytotron, a hydroponic cultivation system whose designs were acquired by the museum. In the same year he began a series of pencil and watercolour drawings imitating the studies of naturalists: views of insects and other species, with notes and analytical references.

In 1977 he took part in the collective submission of the Group of 13 to the São Paulo Biennial, where the group won the Itamaraty Grand Prize, not without controversy, and around this time he began to produce a new series of conceptual works based on the drawings of one of his sons, Tomás, who was only five years old. The works consist of three elements: the child’s drawing, its reworking as a design and its concretion in a volumetric object. This series was exhibited in Los Angeles, New York and Tokyo at the beginning of the 1980s, and from 1978 onwards he took on, in a critical spirit, themes linked to the construction of national identity. In the first place, the countryside – the bastion of Argentina’s agro-livestock industry – and its prototypes: gauchos, ranches, and also tools such as the castration tongs and the designs for cattle brands.

In 1979, together with Clorindo Testa and Jacques Bedel, he won the competition for the recycling of the Centro Cultural Recoleta building. In 1983 he designed the Ruth Benzacar Gallery building, and in 1990, the Munar Foundation, dedicated to design. Between 1984 and 1986, his research into nationality added themes related to pictorial production: quotations and reworkings of works by Jean-Léon Pallière and travelling painters. Towards the end of the decade, he developed his interest in Patagonia and, in particular, in the expeditions of naturalists such as Fitz Roy and Darwin, in Del viaje del Beagle (On the Voyage of the Beagle). The works, composed of drawings and objects, simulate the exhibits of a natural science museum.

Cynthia Cohen

Cynthia Cohen, 1969, was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Graduated from Nacional school Prilidiano Pueyrredón, studied with Laura Batkis and did workshops with Pablo Suarez and Marcia Shwartz. Between numerous individual and collective exhibitions both in the country and abroad, stand out, “Bomba de Brillo”, Museo Marco (2020) PanDulce”(2019)Galeria PastoBrasil, BuenosAires“Naturaleza, refugio y recurso del hombre” en CCK (2017), “Futuro brillante” en Galería Van Riel (2016), “El resplandor” en PrismaKh, (2015), “Obra reciente” en Galería del Paseo, Lima (2014), “Monumentos ingravidos” en Galeria del Paseo, Punta del Este (2014), “Una acción para la amistad” en Centro Cultural Recoleta (2014), “Penetración en el medio“en Museo Macro, Rosario (2013), “Candy Crush” en Fundación Esteban Lisa (2013), “Deforme”en CC Ricardo Rojas (2012), “Poderosa Afrodita” en Museo de la Mujer, Córdoba (2011),“SynchroNYcity” en Consulado Argentino en Nueva York (2011) y “Sin palabras” en CC Recoleta(2008). Some of the awards obtained include the selection of her work in Banco Central (2015), Premio Primera Selección Fundación Banco Ciudad (2000), Primer Premio Distinción Alianza Francesa (2000) y Primera Selección Premio Universidad de Palermo (1999).