"Tubo semiluminoso 1-5 (Semi-Luminous Tube 1-5)".
Mixed technique on paper, polycarbonate sheet, cable, rope, printed calendar from a shop, neodymium magnets.
120 cm high, variable diameter.
2014.
Photo credits: Martín Pisotti.
"Tubo semiluminoso 1-5 (Semi-Luminous Tube 1-5)".
Mixed technique on paper, polycarbonate sheet, cable, rope, printed calendar from a shop, neodymium magnets.
120 cm height, variable diameter.
2014.
Photo credits: Javier Gonzalez Tuñon.
Installation views, beside Ezequiel Azambuya and Gala Berger's works.
Photo credits: Ruth Benzacar Gallery's press release.
October 2015, online review in Otra Parte magazine,
by Martin Legon.
In mid-November, after decades in Florida at 1000, the Ruth Benzacar gallery moves its doors; one of the capital events in the local artistic calendar, not only because of the sum of restructuring that entails leaving the downtown in search of new poles in Villa Crespo and La Boca, but because rarely has the scene lent itself so open to reflecting in situ on the movement of a reference place. In that sense, it is fresh and healthy that the gallery board proposed Alejo Ponce de León, a young curator with little experience in the medium, to project a closing with absolute freedom.
Two issues are striking in Ponce's curatorship; firstly, the verticalism implicit in all the final assembly and production decisions is evident, and consequently we are witnessing a collective exhibition that establishes the curator as the axis of construction of a contemporary installation. Secondly, interaction is also observed outside the traditional circuit of names, by entrusting the design of specific pieces to a closer circle of friends. Prioritizing a tone, the exhibition seems to address in parallel the idea of the end of the cycle that is perceived, latent, in the national semantic field; This is what they refer to from the title October 2015 to a reference to Máximo Kirchner in the room text and a link to next year's electoral roll, which gives rigorous reading to a sample that is extremely soulless in its ability to represent, but that It perfectly outlines a question: how to stage, in short, the closing of a period, a transmutation, a change?
With this in mind, and in a movement of almost cinematic beauty, we are invited to leave the gallery and walk down the long side hallway until we find the lights, the cement and the cars parked in the underground parking lot of Plaza San Martín. Although every parking lot is in itself a great metaphor for the transition, in this case a more existential and intrauterine sense prevails. There, at the end of the tour, some works from the personal collection of Ruth, the emblematic founder of the space in 1965, who died in May 2000, hang from the ceiling. Sívori, Berni, Romero, Pombo float among dozens of people who pass through the place daily, foreign to the mythical place of Argentine culture. For this reason, and for the absence in the main room of any concomitant canonical gesture, the closed concept that Ponce elaborates for his artistic-political requiem suggestively formulates, with its ostracism, the impossibility of drawing on a tradition or of linking productively with a passed beyond descendants, simultaneously questioning the limits of an installation and the role of art in praxis.
"October 2015", curated by Alejo Ponce de León,
Ruth Benzacar Gallery, Buenos Aires, October 2014.