HYPNOPHILIA: FLORENCIA RODRÍGUEZ GILES AT RUTH BENZACAR

So that they can have beautiful dreams, I carry their filthy currents. Text by Alfredo Aracil.

While in her previous exhibition (Biodélica, 2018) a group of large-scale drawings, playing with the codes of historical painting and muscular representations of titans and other monsters, documented the imagination in its most utopian side, as the birth of new nature and a new mutant people, in this opportunity the posthumanist evolution that the artist explores in an attempt to dissolve the binary structures of dominant thinking is part of a process of crossing dreams and life experiences with another person, Marcia Farias de Lazzarini, who is part of CAOs -a community of practice oriented to experimentation in art, mental health and ways of life located in La Plata, where Florencia Rodríguez Giles has been working and living since 2020-.

Bathed in a fragrance of sensory intensification as beautiful as it is terrifying, Hypnophilia presents large-format drawings and soundscapes that, inspired by Marcia's memories, give shape to an installation originating in a mutually supportive relationship. A therapeutic accompaniment by artistic means, which hides, between the lines, a question about how breaking with image, history and personal mood structures can enable a healing experience or, in a perhaps less grandiloquent sense, a less normative and stereotyped form of health.

The metamorphosis of an ego that, in its estrangement, needs maps to be able to orient itself. A cartography to survive the adventure of ceasing to be oneself, a method of inquiry that avoids the ways of analytical interpretation, because it is an inquiry understood and, above all lived, as a process of poetic co-creation.

And yet, it seems that no life that aspires to be accomplished by the process of development and exploration can avoid the shadow of police, weapons and potential aggressors, of a metaphysical violence, but at the same time real, very real and concrete. Although in this case, unlike in detective novels, no matter how hard one scratches, what never appears is an eternal or unique truth, a salvation that would solve the enigma and guarantee the return to order. And instead, an accumulation of more or less possible relationships is drawn, a montage created from heteroclite materials that refuse to be identified as one thing or the other, confusing celestial forces with subterranean powers, mixing water, sky and earth, making dreams indistinguishable from nightmares, reality and fiction, in an imperfect synthesis of art, politics and therapy.

Hypnophilia. Exhibition by Florencia Rodriguez Giles.

Until October 5, 2024.

Ruth Benzacar Art Gallery. Juan Ramirez de Velasco 1287. Buenos Aires, Argentina.