IN DIALOGUE: ROSARIO ZORRAQUIN, NOEMÍ GERSTEIN AND CECILIA MARCOVICH

In this exhibition the arrows go in all directions: a front march can also be a counter-march, a counter-march can be something formal, just lines .... or many counter-marches at once, all superimposed on each other. This is formally the Glossary that Rosario began in a publication in 2014, and which rehearsed a kind of communication by noise, a communication by pinches. That language, in the key of the writings of Mirtha Dermisache and others, is now recomposed in layered drawings and touch appears, and a variation with a purpose: to be able to read the stories of torture and counter-marches in the history of (...) The exhibition is also a meeting point for the staging of this language taken to relief, a round of reading between Noemí, Cecilia and Rosario, and there the room is transformed into a cave.

The exercise, because it is, of bringing together works by three artists, does not fail to highlight an "I", which is Rosario's... Susana Thénon speaks of "I am I and my Peripherals". The Peripherals are the ones you still have the option to choose, but that doesn't mean that they occupy a lesser place. Intensity always happens in the periphery and goes towards the centre. Cecilia Marcovich founded a school, through which María Moreno quickly passed, and on that edge something of her crooked standing was built. Cecilia's school was a pioneer of what we know today as a work clinic, not only an alternative to the channels of official education, but also a centre of experimentation that crossed generations and personalities, where work was done not only from technique, but also from conversation and words.

Marcovich didn't stay still, when she was in Brazil it was for the physiognomy of the body, another era, when she was here, she came to portray something of those spontaneous crowds in the street, in a circle or all looking forward. She did women-only marches, in colour and in black and white... and she opted for the round. Noemi Gerstein is the other peripheral, who, according to Claudio Iglesias, "the gothic in her is like a somewhat submerged organ ready to emit low and high-pitched sounds that will travel through the air with their blue and violet tones". Almost in an oceanic feeling, his sculptures, which preferred iron, could range from maternity to war, from metaphysical figuration to the commonplaces of love. But above all he constructed a language supported by forms and arriving at what Osvaldo Svanancini called a "silent symbolism". Rosario's drawings superimpose images of lines, which are not memories, which are not visions either. They are at the perfect affective distance: that which is alien to the exquisite corpse, the meditatively autobiographical. They are lines to be followed more with the fingers than with the eyes: or with the eyes that are at the tip of each of the fingers, as Diana Aisenberg repeats.

There is no idea of referents, even less an intention of rescue, or a rescue in reverse: they rescue us, as Diana Bellesi would say: "As if I were bitten by a viper, I jump and say: they rescue me. In reality, they have constructed me, otherwise there would be no emotional identification possible, and the language of the poem would be a dead language".

–Santiago Villanueva, creator of the project.

RONDA, in dialogue with works by Noemí Gerstein and Cecilia Marcovich.

Until the end of April, 2024.

ISLA FLOTANTE Gallery. Viamonte 776, Buenos Aires, Argentina.