Fernanda Laguna

Beauty and Happiness, Laguna´s gallery and art store, marked a whole epoch: in it, beauty was exhibited without reservations. “Art appears where it is not expected”, Jorge Gumier Maier pointed out at that time. Of his disciples, Laguna was the closest to him in terms of ideology; she loved the art of the ineffable, the aura that transcends words.
Cut out canvases constitute the artist’s signature style and, as a tribute to the master from Rosario, she presents Fontana, a painting with plant motifs framed in wicker. The work is reminiscent of Fontana´s famous cuts, yet Laguna´s decorative painting, in which a rose color predominates, differs from the gesture and the revolutionary ideas of the avant-garde artist. Laguna is not less revolutionary, but her work and the way in which she views the world travel along opposite roads.
There is a series of openwork canvases, landscapes that evoke the surrealist paintings, in which the hole in the canvas may be viewed as a sun or a full moon. A diptych entitled Para siempre reveals the emotional tone of the show, while the works crossed with wool or those that tell life stories have the aesthetic quality of the beautiful.
Laguna shows her total adhesion to the so-called “pure art”, art for art’s sake, liberated from any reason alien to its own existence. Nevertheless, Laguna´s cultural managing has a high socio political content. After the 2001 crisis she became one of the founders of “Eloísa cartonera”, a publishing house that bought cardboard in the streets of the sad city of Buenos Aires, to publish books painted by the “cartoneros” . If to this project is added the art gallery that she inaugurated in Villa Fiorito, currently a secondary school with an artistic orientation, anyone could imagine Laguna building, like León Ferrari, a bomber plane with a crucified Christ.
Yet, faithful to an art alien to the socio political context, without subordinating herself to any discourse, consistent with an art considered "light" and "senseless" (in political and conceptual terms) her life is a model of the most genuine concern for her fellow men and women. Today, she is an unavoidable figure in the art scene. And even though the controversy on the aesthetic instances has become much less attention-grabbing, Laguna’s cultural managing advances, quietly.