Artists: Amadeo Azar, Sofía Bohtlingk , Adriana Bustos, Marina Daiez, Alejandra Fenochio, Alberto Goldenstein, Silvia Gurfein, Guido Ignatti, Cynthia Kampelmacher, Fernanda Laguna & Luciana Caamaño, Lux Lindner, Alfredo Londaibere, Guzmán Paz, Gastón Persico, Tiziana Pierri, Rosana Schoijett, Julián Terán, Juan Tessi, Ana Tiscornia, Osías Yanov

Curator: Silvia Gurfein

Drawing is related to becoming. Precisely because we cannot
be a child, a madman, an animal, a mountain. But we can
become a mountain. And with a little luck, we can even
become the air that envelops the mountain or the eagle that circles over it.
I think this has been one of my dreams: to fly in circles much higher than the mountains.
John Berger, On Drawing

This exhibition displays some ways of doing and thinking about drawing, the ways of understanding today this ancient and precious practice, knowing that some of the exhibited artists have this medium as their main language in their artistic journey, others frequent it intermittently and there are those who have some eventual contact, less explored or with ways of drawing that are not necessarily pencil and paper.

In 1963, Natalia Ginzburg published what would become one of her most recognized works, Léxico Familiar, in which the Italian author recounts her childhood in the nucleus of an anti-fascist Jewish family. Her story, at times luminous and soft, at others shouting and colorful or dark and difficult, is a very precise combination of intimacy and exteriority. She herself, in another essay The Little Virtues, points out that the fabric of words contains the threads of the social fabric: “at the heart of our lives is the problem of our human relationships“.

This intimate and familiar portrait gives an account of an era, in this interior, there is the trace and the reflection on the outside, on society as a whole.

I borrow this title, aware of its greatness, but with the intention of bringing something of this idea, that of the possible reading of a larger situation through looking at what is close. Also, because of what the lexical and familiar terms themselves mean in their polysemy, but above all thinking of a common vocabulary. A glossary located in this region of the world here and now.

In this extended family, which are the artists and the works exhibited here today, there are conversations, quarrels, interlocutions and joys. Eventual kinships, complicities and associations. Ordinary affinities and irreconcilable differences. Always floating in the tense love that family ties can give us.

The members of this assembled family that is the show, at times take each other by the hand to travel through unknown territories or invent games. Some dance or cry. Almost always, they think in solitude and write, drawing those thoughts.

When I see the works I think of how many possible forms drawing can take, how many ways of approaching it, the infinite ways of reading it, the incredible luck I have to see them.

Finally, this exhibition is a repertoire of voices that speak this language that is drawing. Or perhaps it is a proto-language, which is the name given to the common ancestor of a family or branch of languages. To imagine what we want in this world, to become who we want to be, we have a language that we have always carried at our fingertips.

Silvia Gurfein, March 2024