IN THE PRESENT, IN THE STRANGE: BASUALDO AND CANCELA AT RUTH BENZACAR
Ruth Benzacar Gallery of Art presents In medias res, the new solo exhibition by Eduardo Basualdo, and Oh Dear Oh Dear ¡How queer everything is today! by Delia Cancela.
Eduardo Basualdo: In medias res
In medias res invites the viewer to embark on a physical and emotional journey that unfolds in the present tense. It does not narrate a linear story, but rather places the visitor at the center of a situation—within a timeless drama. Entering the gallery, the public is faced with an abyss: a series of pieces that condense the solitude and disorientation of the present. From there, the exhibition unfolds as a descent into the depths. Charcoal drawings, raw and visceral in their force, act as gestures of demolition turned inward toward the body.
Through sculptures that appear to be built from remnants, the path toward the heart of the exhibition begins. A massive aluminum surface slowly collapses over the gallery space, forming a mountainous landscape whose cavern can be entered, immersed in a dim light where space is perceived more as a presence than as architecture.
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Eduardo Basualdo. In medias res, 2025. Cortesía Ruth Benzacar Galería de Arte
Basualdo’s works invite the viewer into an active experience, where risk heightens the senses and each step demands full attention. His installations are presented as dramatic landscapes, in which the public ceases to be a mere witness and becomes the protagonist of a tangible, tense, and profoundly human fiction.
The exhibition is accompanied by a text written by Juan Mattio.
Delia Cancela: Oh Dear Oh Dear ¡How queer everything is today!
The Argentine artist’s exhibition marks the beginning of a new shared journey. Oh Dear Oh Dear ¡How queer everything is today! will be accompanied by a text by philosopher Marie Bardet, who offers a sensitive and sharp reading of Cancela’s work. She highlights the artist’s gesture of “radical irreverence” against the limits imposed by disciplines, and her vital and free way of making art.
Delia Cancela works with persistence to give life, color, and presence to tiny fragments—scraps of paper, pieces of tarlatan fabric, small objects, as well as phrases and excerpts from books. These elements play within each work as fragments of different times that come into contact—glimpses of conflicting sensations (in both senses of the word) that collide and spark something unique: traces of visits to other universes (literary, historical, animal, vegetal) that take us on a walk along the edge of (non)sense.
In this exhibition, Oh Dear Oh Dear ¡How queer everything is today!, strangeness seeps in as the unique power of the fragmentary—what is never quite complete or clearly recognizable—and comes together to form configurations that defy the coordinates of the world and of our perception, moving between the human, the vegetal, and the animal.
Both exhibitions will be on view starting Saturday, July 5 at Ruth Benzacar Gallery, Juan Ramírez de Velasco 1287, C1414, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
*Cover image: Eduardo Basualdo, 2025. Courtesy Ruth Benzacar Galería de Arte.
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