Museums and galleries aren’t the only places to find art in Buenos Aires. The city is full up with cultural centers, whose myriad activities inevitably include some combination of visual art, theater, music, and dance. These mainstays of the BA landscape run the full gambit from highly institutionalized centers to hidden multipurpose spaces, affectionately called “under” for underground, although many of them are quite well known. Club Cultural Matienzo, an exemplary worst-kept secret, has given two emerging artists a chance to shine in their dual show “F de Verdadero” or “F is for Truth.”
Drawing work from still in-progress solo projects, Geraldine Barón and Iara Kremer attempt to unsettle the categorizations we make about our social and physical environments in order to make them more comfortable. In doing so, they address the central conceit of photography, that it portrays the world without distortion, writing in their artist’s statement that “the two bodies of work are connected by a common element: lies.” And indeed, the selections from Barón’s “Losing You,” and Kremer’s “Everybody Lies” expose the false front of their own images.
In Barón’s work, a documentary style in mostly black and white, the picture comes in the form of a question, but the answer lies somewhere outside the frame. Taking her family as subject, she draws a line between reality and interpretation. The situations initially seem familiar — a birthday party, going to sleep — but something is confused, unfocused, harsh, or anxious below the surface, in the glance of a sister or frown of a father.
I had a chance to speak with Barón at the opening, and she elaborated that the work was about “our need to create narratives through which we contextualize our lives and the complex and faulty nature of these narratives. The title of our show is a play on words that addresses the problematic idea of truthfulness or construction of a truth, and the relationship between how we contextualize experience collectively and our perception of it.”
Kremer has a very different visual style, drawing from the vocabularies of digital photography and collage. This particular project was inspired by a critical essay of Antonioni’s “Blow-Up,” (his first English language film, inspired by a Cortázar story) entitled “Todos Mienten” by Matia Piñeiro. Parts of the series appear more obviously staged, again drawing attention to the ways we escape reality through imagination.
Her characters are less specific than Barón’s, occupying a pop-candy colored universe where even mundane objects like public telephones and typewriters help construct a narrative in which we can comfortably participate. In foregrounding that construction, Kremer exposes the insecurity and confusion which motivate and underlie it.
She told me that her work “reflects different personal situations and feelings — wanting to escape, the search, wanting to write, doubt, seductions. The title ‘everybody lies’ is due in part to the fact that the photographs are not showing the reality of the subjects, but my reality.”
Despite divergent aesthetic styles, these two projects compliment each other well, evoking (for me at least) the anxiety that comes from discovering that an assumption was wrong, or that reality is more complicated than we would like to imagine.
Text by Kate Redburn
F de Verdadero
Through January 16th
Club Cultural Matienzo
Matienzo 2424, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Open Tuesday through Sunday from 6 PM
