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Carlos Gorriarena: Mujeres en vísperas

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Each in Their Own World

What is it that truly takes place in Carlos Gorriarena’s paintings? What is the reality that moves beneath what appears to reveal a certain fullness, including the fullness of twilight?

Any answer we venture should be careful not to be carried away by the meaning things seem to have at first glance. For it is within that interstitial dimension—where paradox alters the experience of revelation (what remains unseen within what is seen)—that Gorriarena’s paintings pierce through their own artistic identity like an arrow, attaining a state of suspended, charged meaning.

Gorriarena, a prince of color, knows better than anyone that there are living organisms at work beneath the splendor of vivid colors—that is, processes of decay already underway—as if to say: there is a lemon beneath the color yellow. The contrast between the exalted exterior and the hidden interior pressing outward with a drama that cannot yet be seen is the soul of his art and, perhaps, the one gift among his many talents that could be considered irreplaceable.

Gorriarena’s images are images of what is about to happen. In those eves whose future remains uncertain, an aggravating condition emerges: the future has already begun to erode the present reality of events. Time enters the instant, deploying its invisible armies. Within that discreet yet irreversible leveling, women appear as flesh-and-blood ghosts who resist—whether with elegance or despair—the calamities of the countdown.

On the opposite side of his reflections on men—ordinary beasts drawn toward the black sun of power, which, as in his version of the Pact of Olivos, casts shadows different from those of the sun that shelters the world—Gorriarena’s women belong to a different species altogether. They are absorbed by an inner world in which they lose themselves only to find themselves again.

What we encounter is what might be called a “gallery” in the sense of a gallery of characters, where women—even women reduced to objects—display the singularity of subjects who remain unreadable. What they think, what they feel, and who they are belong to a specific mystery: the mystery of identity. For unlike Gorriarena’s men—universal and interchangeable despite their most disparate appearances—each woman is unique.

Exalted or calm, slender or full-bodied, clothed or nude, poised in action or in potential, Carlos Gorriarena’s women are creatures endowed with an earthly human power, one that men tend to disdain as they seek their own among the gods they imitate.

This marks an irreconcilable difference between the genders that, in Gorriarena’s work, becomes evident whenever men and women—with few exceptions—gather within a circle of intimacy. There, the woman looks at the man, while the man gazes toward a beyond where he perhaps glimpses the horizon of his ideals. And while one says, “Good evening,” the other replies, “Good morning.”

This is the crux of a question that Gorriarena’s art has revealed: there is no greater closeness between woman and man than the shared fate that keeps each within their own world.

Juan Becerra

VERTIGO

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Antonio Asís, Julio Le Parc, Gregorio Vardanega, Rogelio Polesello, Gyula Kosice, Martha Boto, Perla Benveniste, Eduardo Rodríguez, Luis Tomasello, and Manuel Espinosa.

In 1958, Alfred Hitchcock released Vertigo, a film that marked a milestone in cinema history and introduced one of the most recognizable visual and narrative techniques of modern film: the dolly zoom. This device alters spatial perception through the simultaneous movement of the camera and zoom in opposite directions, generating a sense of instability, disorientation, and estrangement.

A few years earlier, in 1955, the Denise René Gallery in Paris presented the exhibition Le Mouvement, where kinetic art was consolidated for the first time as a distinct movement. Its central elements were movement, space, and time, manifested through various approaches: works activated only through the viewer’s movement, pieces transformed through direct interaction with the public, and motorized devices operating autonomously.

The integration of cinema with this artistic manifestation, by focusing on visual language through movement, introduces a specific reflection on perception as an unstable construction. As Roger Bordier noted in his text Cinéma, the moving image reorganizes the relationship between time, space, and gaze. It is precisely at this point that this exhibition situates itself: a shared inquiry into the ways perception is activated, disrupted, and transformed into experience.

This exhibition takes the title Vertigo to present a selection of works by Antonio Asís, Julio Le Parc, Gregorio Vardanega, Rogelio Polesello, Gyula Kosice, Martha Boto, Perla Benveniste, Eduardo Rodríguez, Luis Tomasello, and Manuel Espinosa. Like the cinematic technique that inspires it, these works produce visual instability, generating a dynamic field in which the fixed becomes unstable and perception is in constant transformation.

As a member of the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV), Julio Le Parc established in Paris the foundations of a practice centered on the active participation of the viewer, transforming and disrupting the meaning of the artwork toward experience. These investigations continued to develop in Buenos Aires in works that required movement, interaction, and variations of light within the image to fully unfold geometric structures, in dialogue with precedents such as those of Gyula Kosice, whose dynamic conception of geometry—initiated in the Madí group—projected and consolidated itself within kinetic art.

Within this framework, artists such as Antonio Asís and Manuel Espinosa worked on perceptual activation through minimal operations, whether by optical vibrations generated by chromatic units or through subtle tonal variations. Meanwhile, Luis Tomasello produced three-dimensional geometric environments where color and space transform according to the viewer’s position. In turn, Martha Boto and Gregorio Vardanega, along with Perla Benveniste and Eduardo Rodríguez, developed investigations linked to motorized systems and light effects, deepening the distortion of light and color and collectively evidencing the convergence between art, science, and technology in the construction of new forms of perception.

These artists explored devices capable of producing a new visual sensibility, aligned with the changing reality of their time, just as cinema explored the technical possibilities of the moving image. In both cases, this involves experimentation with the limits of the visible and a challenge to the stability of form, within a context shaped by the expansion of technology and reproduction media, incorporating industrial materials, mechanical systems, and logics of seriality characteristic of the period.

Kinetic art proposes situations: open experiences that invite viewers to inhabit the work. As Elena Oliveras notes, these pieces generate a constant excitation of attention, a dimension of uncertainty, a “not knowing what will happen,” which activates the senses and produces an ever-unstable fascination.

Vertigo thus proposes a journey through a set of practices that turned movement—real or illusory—into a tension, challenging our ways of perceiving and reminding us that all vision is, ultimately, a construction in motion.

Capricho de Verano

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This summer, MC Galería opens its doors to an exhibition featuring a curated selection of artists from the gallery’s back room, offering a representative overview of the aesthetic and conceptual diversity that defines the space, and highlighting renowned figures of Argentine art.

The exhibition seeks to showcase the wide range of languages, techniques, and approaches that coexist within the gallery through three thematic rooms, inviting visitors to explore different movements and key moments in modern and contemporary Argentine art.

Among the artists on view are Edgardo Giménez, Ary Brizzi, Oscar Bony, Kenneth Kemble, Ernesto Deira, Jorge De La Vega, Eduardo Costa, Rogelio Polesello, César Paternosto, Cynthia Cohen, and Vicente Grondona.

[En común] Horacio Zabala y amigos.

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The historical moment they happened to share, the territories they coincided in inhabiting, the ideas floating in the air of a single generation, the artist networks they belonged to, or simply chance —which does not exist— made it so that, from the mid-1960s to today, Horacio Zabala has been surrounded by the professional and personal friendship of Juan Carlos Romero, Carlos Ginzburg, Edgardo Vigo, Luis Pazos, and Leandro Katz.

En común proposes to update that dialogue between past and present among artists who cultivated object-based practices, the readymade, visual poetry, performance, and photography in order to point to, denounce, or parody different aspects of contemporary life. All of them participants in the exhibitions of the CAYC, created by Jorge Glusberg in 1968—whether from Argentina or elsewhere in the world—contributed their own vision to international conceptual art.

Acting since the turbulent 1960s with the imprint of questioning the limits of art, proposing an anti-art, and merging art, sociology, and philosophy through analytical approaches characterizes the vision of the artists in En común. Presenting instead of exhibiting, suspending judgment as a political gesture, unsettling established values, and ironizing their own practice are actions that unite Zabala, Romero, Ginzburg, Vigo, Pazos, and Katz in solitary, monumental, and ambiguously unmotivated adventures that fulfill their purpose: reflecting on what is given, what exists, what has been made natural.

Images and the discourses built around them—whether for explicit or masked intentions—are a favorite theme of these snipers of language, builders through destruction, visionaries of catastrophe. From the simple and readily at hand, from poor yet beautiful materials, to the sophistication of dismantling the scaffolding of modern and contemporary thought, there is no fatigue, since art is “the world for a second time,” as Horacio Zabala defined it in 1998: “The work of art opens a game between art and the world.” It is another gaze—interested, connoted—that, provisionally, frees itself from the notion of transcendence.

María José Herrera

A través del espejo

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Renata Schussheim, Edgardo Giménez, and Juan Stoppani are artists with vast and undeniable trajectories. Faced with that, what could I possibly add that hasn’t already been said by critics, curators, and art historians? What can one say in the face of the power of their work? To begin with: every encounter with them has been—and continues to be—a celebration, a breath of fresh air, both inspiring and revitalizing. An endless compendium of anecdotes, experiences, and projects.

Great artists are often defined by their careers—shaped by milestones, brilliance, and recognition. But that’s not what defines them. While their artistic journeys are indeed impressive, what truly identifies and sets them apart is their creative freedom, their adventurous spirit, their unwavering commitment to art.

None of what they have accomplished would have been possible without the consistency and conviction that fuel their practice. Their hunger for work, their way of observing the world and inventing their own, their willingness to take risks, to remain faithful to their desires, to experience and share joy. They have developed deeply personal bodies of work while collaborating with fellow creators—musicians, filmmakers, playwrights—navigating different disciplines and languages without prejudice.

This exhibition, which brings them together for the first time, invites us to step through the looking glass and discover characters and animals embracing and encouraging all kinds of interspecies fantasies—revealed under a perfect, round moon resting in a star-studded sky. A labyrinthine sculpture rises from a landscape of irregular geometries and portraits of birds and young ladies, while a curtain opens to the backstage of The Carnival of the Animals and The Child and the Spells.

Adventure books—like those chronicling the wanderings of Alice, written by Lewis Carroll in the second half of the 19th century—have always nurtured the imaginations of children and adults across time. In much the same way, Renata, Edgardo, and Juan do so in this exhibition. And, whether intentionally or not, they offer us the chance to reflect on the importance of fostering imagination as a means of building freer and more creative societies.

Laura Spivak

*  The Carnival of the Animals (1886) is a musical suite composed by Camille Saint-Saëns. The Child and the Spells (1925) is an opera with music by Maurice Ravel and a libretto by Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette.

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

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Ernesto Deira pertenece a ese conjunto de artistas que practicó la pintura como una gesta, una figuración magmática de paleta agitada por rojos, azules y amarillos intensos, que salpicara el sentido común fuera del bastidor. Como si sus personajes surgieran a partir de algún proceso volcánico, desde 1961, con poco más de treinta años de edad, Deira fue parte de quienes renovaron la representación de lo humano por medio de esa dimensión material espesa y excedida, un sustrato que el Informalismo había hinchado de protagonismo pocos años antes.

La selección reunida en esta exposición recorta ese periodo experimental, en que el artista exploró las posibilidades de la pintura, pero también del dibujo y del montaje de la obra al momento de la exhibición.1 Se trata de obras producidas entre 1961 y 1966, pobladas de criaturas vitales e indescifrables, incluidas varias pinturas de gran porte. La mayoría de estos dibujos y pinturas no lleva título, como si ese estado de indeterminación no debiera estabilizarse con un nombre. Pero algunos títulos –El estudiante de lógica formal o Retrato familiar– matizan la ferocidad de esas imágenes con una ironía risueña: esas figuras, que no parecen haber terminado de fraguar, se nos presentan como una suerte de contracara extrañada, o de imagen reveladora, de personajes cotidianos y sensatos.

Retrato familiar (1964) retoma el juego de la imagen dentro de la imagen, en un comentario sobre la pintura y su tradicional función retratística: sobre un fondo azul, dentro de dos óvalos trazados con brochazos de color rojo, se adivinan los rostros, de frente y perfil, de dos señores -llevan traje y bastón como atributos. El “retrato” de la derecha, congelado en una mueca, muestra una expresión cadavérica. El de la izquierda se escure hacia abajo, desbordando el marco rojo oval representado. La obra parece una declaración de principios, tanto acerca del despropósito de plasmar una semblanza verosímil en una imagen pintada, como de la apuesta irrenunciable por representar lo humano.

De veladura blanca y más de dos metros y medio de lado, una pintura de 1963 representa, delante de una sutil pero decisiva línea de horizonte, lo que podría describirse como un conjunto indeterminado de figuras humanoides. Tienen ojos, no solo en lo que parecen ser sus rostros sino también en sus manos. O tienen manos que son, a su vez, pequeñas cabezas con ojos. En el revés del bastidor se leen los nombres de quienes integraron el grupo de la Nueva Figuración entre 1961 y 1964: Macció, Noé, De la Vega y también Deira.2 ¿Será tal vez un guiño o un reconocimiento a esos artistas cómplices? La representación de esa agrupación, que para 1963 ya se había disipado, como una suerte de organismo multicéfalo que pintó y dibujó lo que veía, menos con los ojos, que con las manos.

Los reversos de esta y otras de las telas exhibidas ofrecen pistas de redes e itinerarios artísticos que excedieron la escena cultural de la Buenos Aires de los años sesenta; un misterioso “Martha Peluffo” escrito en otro bastidor; una etiqueta de la Bienal Americana de Arte, que las Industrias Kaiser organizaron en Córdoba entre 1962 y 1966, en una pintura de 1964 y , en la mencionada El estudiante de lógica formal, de 1965, una etiqueta de la legendaria galería Bonino, que promocionó a los cuatro pintores de la nueva figuración durante esos años. Aquí hay que señalar el impacto que tuvo, entre los artistas cariocas, la exposición del grupo Nueva Figuración de 1963 en la sede de la galería Bonino de Rio de Janeiro y, dos años más tarde, en el Museo de Arte Moderno de esa ciudad, donde se exhibió Retrato familiar (1964) entre las 12 obras de Deira.3 La selección de pinturas en exhibición también da cuenta de la proyección hacia los Estados Unidos, en la exposición de Deira de 1964 en la galería de la Pan American Union, Washignton DC, cuyo catálogo reproduce la feroz pintura sin título de 1963, que representa una cabeza humana.

Si las pinturas de esos años dieron forma a esa vocación experimental por medio de masas insurrectas de color esparcido, los dibujos realizados en paralelo juegan en su propio campo: el desarrollo lineal (o el pensamiento lineal, para citar el título de una exposición de dibujos de los años ochenta que incluyó a Deira),4 en franco negro sobre blanco. De tamaños más modestos, algunos parecen realizados con movimientos continuos, sin levantar la pluma. Y todos configuran personajes, entre precarios y sofisticados que, gracias a las posibilidades de la tinta sobre papel, presentan detalles, como dientes, cabelleras, órganos y huesos, mezclados con ovillos y otras formas aleatorias, pero misteriosamente humanas.

Dibujos y pinturas se refuerzan mutuamente en sus especificidades a la vez que confluyen como formas de ser humano, esto es como medios por los cuales Deira exploró la figuración de manera vital y múltiple.

Isabel Plante, mayo de 2025.

1 María José Herrera, “La experimentación en la obra de Ernesto Deira (1961-1968), en María José Herrera (cur.), Retrospectiva Deira. Buenos Aires, Museo Nacional de Bellas, Artes, 2006, pp. 10-21.


2 Si bien, la primera exposición conjunta también estuvo integrada por Sameer Makarius y Carolina Muchnik, el grupo se estabilizó luego con estos cuatro integrantes: Ernesto Deira, Jorge De la Vega, Rómulo Macció y Luis F. Noé.

3 Paulo Herkenkoff, Nueva figuración Río/Buenos Aires. Río de Janeiro, Galería del Instituto Cultural Brasil-Argentina, 1987.

4 Luis Felipe Noé y Jorge López Anaya (org.), El pensamiento lineal. En torno a la autonomía de la línea a través del dibujo argentino. Buenos Aires, Fundación San Telmo, 1988.

Fancy Monas

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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!

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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.