Opening: August 28th
Visits: Saturdays from 2 PM to 6 PM
Fictions of the Real What is it about making a portrait today? Or rather, for Alejandra Fenochio, what is it about making a portrait today? STREET and its silent inhabitants account for a procedure that the artist, who prefers the nobility and industriousness of painting to design her work, has been exploring for years. However, in this exhibition of selected large-scale pieces the procedure bursts before our gaze like a spit that alerts us and stains us with an evident, silent, and struck-out reality. Fenochio portrays what needs to be made evident, yet it is forceful in the urban arena of this dispossessed and dispossessing contemporaneity. Fictions of the real in a city where everything is fauna: people and animals, all pets of a domesticating system that reveals a silence loud as thunder. Fenochio does not hesitate to look into the eyes of her portraits, the eyes of the dark skies, of the animals and of the people who no longer rule either this city or any other. The baroque palette, necessarily dark and constructing jumbled shapes, comes to speak to us of these times in which darkness also seizes the moments when light should rule and becomes invisible during the night; yet here these visual narratives have arrived to stay all the time and warn us that at any moment any of us may inhabit these paintings. No one is exempt from being part of the disgrace of this fauna that is only impartial in the brutality of its animality. More precisely: the "disgrace" of being portrayed by Fenochio. Everyone inside. Perhaps no one is out of the picture anymore. In fact, everyone is trapped in these immense works that will probably survive us as a categorical testimony of a world that should have never existed. Cristina Civale
