Between Leaves or The Illuminated Manuscript
What is a mirror? It is the only invented material that is natural.
— Clarice Lispector
Let us imagine a very fine metal point scratching across a polished mirror, removing everything in excess and leaving only the printed letters of a poem behind. The mirror is neither more nor less than a sheet of gilded glass coated with copper leaf, a distilled-water solution, and gelatin crystals. It was left to dry overnight.
Like medieval scribes illuminating ancient manuscripts, the artists engrave the poems while trying not to lose a single letter along the way, constructing around them a sensory landscape made of fabric, brushstrokes, glass, and copper, thus expanding the poetic act into other materialities. As the copyists work with their tools, they find themselves involuntarily reflected in the mirror they have created. Between Leaves, by Sebastián Gordín and Florencia Bohtlingk, emerges from an illuminated reading of the poems of Vanna Andreini.
Each piece in the collection is an autonomous capsule and, at the same time, part of a larger whole, replicating the logic of books of poetry. You are in love with this corner of the world, the woman says to the dog in the poem. Each painting is that corner of autumnal creaking and dampness that the dog sniffs over and over again and that the woman, despite declaring I never learned how to smell, also sniffs out and reads through intuition.
The leaves evoke both nature and the pages of books. It is at this intersection that human experience takes place: reading as a way of exploring the world and, at the same time, exploring oneself. To see this work, one must move, search for the angle, shift position in order to avoid the inevitable: the revelation of our own reflection in what we see.
At once window and protection, the glass allows us to see, hermetically safeguards the chest, and attempts, like the poems, to protect those we love most from pain.
Within this tension between exposure and shelter, the pieces offer refuge: among autumn leaves, layers of meaning, and layers of matter, there emerges the possibility of a shared warmth. Because where else could Gordín’s melancholic boxes and Bohtlingk’s vibrant landscapes meet, if not within the glow of a poem?
Florencia Fragasso, Autumn 2026, Buenos Aires
