Misshapes, Praxis Gallery, Nueva York. Julio-Septiembre 2024
Misshapes
Praxis Gallery, New York, 2024.
In Misshapes, what we perceive as real loses its natural form. Majo Caporaletti, Candelaria Fernández Coya, Emilia Hendreich, Belén López de Carlo, and Francisco Ratti collectively explore the distortion of everyday references as a means of communication. Here, deformity transcends negative connotations and becomes a transformative process through which the artists comment on what surrounds us. Our present and our reality are filtered through fantasy in this exhibition.
How do we connect with one another? This is the question that runs through Belén López de Carlo’s Millennials series. Humans who cannot see and humans who hold our gaze, forcing us to become voyeurs of a cold universe. Paintings that mimic the high definition of the screen, echoing the paradoxical loneliness of our hyperconnected digital characters. Characters that lead us to question how we choose to present ourselves in an era in which our online profiles are an integral part of our personality.
Hidden among everyday landscapes, the figure of Emilia Hendreich appears, literally. In an exercise of translation, the artist’s selfies are transformed into oil paintings on canvas. Emilia allows us to glimpse her intimacy, her home, her neighborhood, her studio, reflecting on the urgency of constant documentation. This urge to capture every moment is perpetuated in her work. These traces of daily life, trapped in our mobile phones and transferred to the canvas by the artist, compel us to question whether what we see before us is real.
In the space between digital life and tangible life emerge the paintings of Francisco Ratti, post-digital works first conceived as drawings on a screen and later converted into canvases painted with acrylic. In this transposition, Ratti forces us to look twice. How do we see a painting? How do we see a screen? What is this that I have in front of me? His works explore the intersection where the artistic imitation of the digital questions the imitation of human creativity by artificial intelligences.
On the other side of a reality saturated with information appear the paintings of Majo Caporaletti. Women who look inward, stripped-down environments, animals that speak of a return to nature. This group of oils presents places unfamiliar to our eyes, which gradually grow accustomed to an atmosphere of mystery as contemplation unfolds. Majo paints forces at rest, conveying the moment of calm before or after action. Her oils invite the viewer to pause amid the frenetic rhythm of everyday life.
And what about the images that appear when we close our eyes? For Candelaria Fernández Coya, dreams are also part of our everyday universe, of our imagination. Works in which what we believe to be familiar is disrupted. Undulating skies, elongated animals, distorted humans. These landscapes seem to guard a secret, the enigma of the oneiric.
Misshapes brings together five contemporary Argentine artists who deform what we conceive as real. What we consider figurative is approached by each of them in an intimate and personal way. Their collective works encourage the viewer to look beyond superficial appearances, training our gaze to seek authenticity through these transformative distortions. Through these deformations, we learn about our own existence.
