Ruth Benzacar Galería de Arte inaugurates its 2025 season by presenting a series of pieces that emerge from Ana Gallardo’s long work to restore the profile of her artist mother. An artistic practice that repairs and enables becomings.
The exhibition will be displayed in the main hall of the gallery and will be accompanied by a text by Kekena Corvalán.
Opening: Wednesday 12/03, 18hs. Hall 1
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By Kekena Corvalán
Once again, from the full and coherent vitality of her artistic practice, Ana raises a double question that cuts across the most challenging discussions: what subjects should art speak about, in relation to another question that may even sound old and outdated, but which is apparently still valid: what subjects should an artist like Ana speak about?
This exhibition presents one of a series of seven oil paintings by her mother, Carmen Gómez Raba. Each painting is integrated with an embroidery, a ceramic piece (made by her daughter and granddaughter, Rocío Gallardo) and drawings. The installation is not just on the wall, but on another canvas that stretches across the room, from the historical complicity of creating the context in which the mother’s painting is inserted, a plot that is in itself a small visual enigma of diffuse complexity.
Ana has been restoring the profile of her artist mother for years. Now she is doing it by hinting at what it means to restore, to give value to, to bring into the present. With patience and spit, literally. Restoring as repairing, as healing, as sketching. Etymologically, to restore means to put back on its feet. She finds the artist’s mother and she finds herself, as if by repairing Carmen’s works she had restored a place that answers the two initial questions. And she does it, as she has always done, in the recovery of women who do it secretly, alone, in the daily resistance to the violence of the mandate of You can’t, You are not, You don’t know, a theme that could seem frozen today, but is not. Ana continues to provoke, disturb, contradict and provoke violent reactions, even within feminism itself. I have no hesitation in saying that Ana has shaken up the blanket of feminist art more than any other artist who has declared herself as such, especially if we think that the kind of art we are interested in has to do with changing a narrative, disturbing, creating confusion, breaking with the domestication of the gaze and questioning the meaning of our actions and desires. Once again, and in the midst of an even more ‘successful’ trajectory (since CA2M, MAMBO or MUAC), Ana is once again challenging the normative ideology of race, class and gender. Not only does it not matter if this is done by an artist who is perceived as cisheterosexual, white, middle class, I’d almost say it’s a good thing. If we look at Ana’s career, her practices never quite fit into the art system, a kind of being inside that provokes what it means to be an artist and what it means to be a female artist, a gendered artist, which she undoubtedly is.
Two dimensions to think about texts, contexts, post-texts with Ana:
1- From patronage to representation. Ana is living proof that the model of the artist as ethnographer, authorised spokesperson for society and, in many cases, the most reliable one, not only no longer explains a mode of production from a presumed fieldwork of contemporary art, but obstructs it, gentrifying struggles. Today, gender art (and I repeat ad nauseam: Ana has been a gender artist for us since her beginnings) can and should talk about any subject it wants, without exercising this Mycenaean and Messianic compression of social reality. This model of the artist as ethnographer, proposed by Hal Foster in 1996 in the chapter of the same name in his book The Return of the Real, has today been rethought by feminism on the basis of the debate on representation or presentation. Today, from the affective curatorship and the exhibitions we make, we say: ‘we don’t come to represent anything, we come only to expose our existence, re-existence and desire’, delaying the means of representation in order to question them as means of signalling, interpretation, marking, analysis, entropy, statistics, and so on. This, I believe, is Ana’s strength and the sacrifice of nullification from which she has undoubtedly risen gracefully. I don’t want to draw metaphors with the sacrifice, but the exercise of nullification (which we never share, we are not punitivists) perhaps allows us to do so. I believe that Ana’s sacrifice was a crossroads that was worthwhile for all of us. I am convinced that she saved us from the fire that was already consuming us, by facilitating a debate that we were struggling to start, albeit at a devastating personal cost.
2- In terms of materiality, form and process, Ana’s work is faithful to the claim of deviant matter. Restoration works with saliva. The mutual nourishment of materialities, the mother’s painting and Ana’s tongue, running over the piece of canvas again and again, cleaning it and making its dry and dull oil skin shine. Igniting, loving. Ana is always burning. Always with dirty materials, not very noble, poorly rigged, always in search of forms that have nothing to do with anything, but that will heal.
But I don’t want to abandon opacity, I want to use it as a mechanism of secrecy. I repeat, this pixelated image that covers the gallery and is everywhere, the capricious passe-partout in the background that covers the walls of the exhibition, is the synthesis that underlies and explodes any possible regime of truth, that even for this Ana continues to be different in contemporary art, unique in Argentinean art. Ana, who uses the domestic sphere to completely disturb the domesticity of the gaze of all of us.
In this great text (we were talking about what an artist is allowed to TALK about and what she is allowed to TALK about), Ana is the one who sets up the maternal chatter, the images of the mother, the voice that always hurts, the inheritance in the gift of lack. Carmen Gómez Raba, who was also an artist of the sexes, agreed. I know that this is another meaning of the word ‘gender’. But words are not naïve, and that ‘it is another meaning’ is precisely what we argue about in feminism. Perhaps Ana’s work, all of it, speaks of the use of language, of the possibilities of saying, of the place we occupy as women and dissidents, of our conditions of expression. Self-love and collective love: working in the genre of still life and being a woman artist are not so far apart. Feminism, I repeat, has also taught us this. Every day since the verbal and, above all, physical polemic that her exhibition at the MUAC provoked, I’ve been disturbed by this double game of genres, because in Ana’s case it’s a question of disambiguation, of what happens when you enter another regime of visibilities, of the margins (as in all the Carmen Raba Gómez stories). With the conspiracy in the background, Ana recovers this axis of the invisible by going one step further. Because she is politically invisible: that is, she is once again clandestine. Like when she went to Guatemala and her work consisted of getting on a bus and taking supplies to her armed comrades in the jungle, crossing the border into southern Mexico. And while I’m at it, excuse me, I’ve said it from the beginning, it’s impossible for me to cancel Ana or anyone else after all their work in Guatemala. I take back the best definition of performativity I know: that unauthorised exercise of the right to exist that brings the precarious into political life. I read it to Judith Butler, but you taught it to us, Ana, my friend.
From this definition, Ana has never stopped being clandestine, politicising her invisibility, even when she goes out to negotiate with fairs and museums. And that’s what she’s not forgiven for: being open about it, because it’s something constitutive of her work that doesn’t fit into the art world.
Art history, politics, feminism, everything in transition, that old fugitive on which we ride, fleeing forward. In this intense present, the past is everything, because it is our great reality machine. We collide in the nets against the dissolution of political narratives that challenge the regime of univocal truth by turning everything upside down, but the past is the only thing that is present. And in it we burn with vitality. What is at stake is the death of the past: its total disregard, what we simply call disenchantment. And that’s why, Ana, because your works dispute and strain this attempt to restore the vitality of the living from the attentive vitality of the dead, the dead in fact: the story of Carmen and her pictorial production of still lifes. We are all panting here, with Ana, once again.
