A REFLECTION ON THE NATURE OF PERCEPTION

Interlunio by Carla Grunauer.

A journey of canvases that circulate along a path of free associations and mental spaces. Grunauer's work takes as a starting point the anomalous body, desire, fantasy and self-perception. Architectural forms, abstractions and icons coexist in her work. Grunauer explores the development of particular media that combine traditional craft techniques with new materials, which leads to explore her own hybrid techniques of execution as a fundamental part of her project.

Interlunio takes its name from a story written by Oliverio Girondo, Argentine poet and writer. The text focuses on the obsessive drama of a despondent character who, tormented by the noises of the city, flees at night to the countryside in search of peace and quiet. During one of these walks, he recognizes his mother in the vision of a talking cow that points out his frivolity, his wandering life, his lack of commitment, mistakes for which he has been left helpless in life. This publication was accompanied by a series of etchings by Spilimbergo (an Argentine draftsman and painter). Grunauer says: "It is a book I discovered when I was a child in my mother's library. It captured my attention because it had illustrations, and I think it was my first contact with a surrealist narrative, or with what I recognized as science fiction at that time".

Interlunio (Interlude) is also called the lunar phase that happens when the Moon is located exactly between the Earth and the Sun, so that its illuminated hemisphere cannot be seen from our planet.

The paintings that are part of this new series have an impossible light, a light source that does not reveal where it comes from, just like the hallucination of the city's insomnia.

Un rayo de sol, mi peor enemigo (A ray of sunshine, my worst enemy) by Carrie Bencardino.

A series of oil paintings that explore the visual discourses present in the different scenes that the artist has frequented since an early age. Queer party circles, the underground metal scene, characters with body modifications, nightclubs, junk images from the internet, and band iconography are some of the spaces and themes on which Bencardino builds her own story, highlighting its phenomena and contradictions.

The autobiographical is presented as a possible exponent of situations that, isolated from the context that justifies their existence, invite us to think agitation as a way of inhabiting the contemporary world.

"Expanding the limits of my practice by involving other people in the development of the work, recreating instances of agitation, and that representation becomes presented action, are some of my main focuses of interest when working," says the artist. "I isolate code-laden actions from their usual context, and try to condense a given gesture. I am challenged to analyze what happens to those gestures when they are taken out of their usual environment, and what transformations are produced around them when this happens."

Bencardino's work is mainly developed in the field of painting and performance, both practices constituting a narrative of youth and the dis-enfranchisement that ignites and mobilizes it.

Metal Obrero by Nicolás Requena Grau or "China".

A series of works that seek to generate tension between the static and the movement, where the visual perspective is presented more complex than simple.

In his work it is possible to enjoy both the mist and the precise. This possibility gives rise to the simultaneous coexistence of the real and the virtual as associations of focus/consciousness and blur/preconsciousness. Virtual sensibility makes its way by amalgamating the binomials, the back and front of a glass door, the inside and outside of a screen. This mechanics of double perspective gives structure to the second Otaku Metaphysics that peeks through the fog.

The out-of-focus images come from cartoons that migrated from Japan in the 1990s and became popular thanks to children's channels such as Magic Kids, the broadcasting platform for the anime that shaped a generation: Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon, Pokémon, among others. The mist, then, offers another equally clear interpretation, that of memory and dreams.

In China's works, the dubbing also manifests itself, as they are paintings conceived from digital tools. The artist takes from the virtual environment materials and techniques to compose the paintings, translates the Paint aerosol into acrylic, mixes images of popular anime extracted from the Internet with Photoshop tools and then paints them. This is how figures, tools and practices that existed separately, are combined to recreate each other in bastard attitudes.

The virtual sensibility is perceived in the unions, in the twisted crossbreeding of Japanese images with Latin sounds, in the painting of the exact moment that remains outside of time, in the transgression of the physical plane by the digital haze, which reaches its maximum expression with the hologram. It is the animated version of a cultural mix that is entangled between piracy and dubbing, in a backpack with Pokémon and Viejas Locas patches.