Inaugurating the year of its 60th anniversary, Ruth Benzacar Galería de Arte presents Marina De Caro with a set of silkscreen prints of texts of her authorship. The works illustrate the apocryphal epistolary exchange between the women’s rights philosopher Olympe de Gouges and the utopian socialist Charles Fourier.
The exhibition will take over room 2 of the gallery and will be accompanied by a text by Guadalupe Maradei.
Opening: Wednesday 12/03, 18hs. Room 2
Inaugurating the year of its 60th anniversary, Ruth Benzacar Art Gallery presents Marina De Caro with a set of silkscreen prints of texts of her authorship. The works illustrate the apocryphal epistolary exchange between the women’s rights philosopher Olympe de Gouges and the utopian socialist Charles Fourier.
The exhibition will take over room 2 of the gallery and will be accompanied by a text by Guadalupe Maradei.
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Opening: Wednesday 12/03, 18hs. Room 2
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Art in trance
‘I’d rather be a witch than an artist’, says Marina de Caro when asked about her latest production. The 32 engravings gathered in this gallery temple confirm this vocation by inviting us to enter into a ritual that is produced and updated in different spatio-temporal coordinates. Three levels of an ambitious creative project are linked on these walls:
1- The fictionalisation of an epistolary exchange between two leading figures of utopian thought: the philosopher and defender of women’s rights Olympe de Gouges and the utopian socialist Charles Fourier. Invoking these two figures of French history, he uses the letter as a tool of thought, nourished by the mutual and affective interpellation of the characters.
2- The multiform chromoutopias embodied in the interventions of Cromoactivismos (a group of “poetic and transversal anti-Pantone activism” active in Buenos Aires since 2013, of which De Caro is a member). These engravings echo certain chromoactive procedures and aesthetics, with their inescapable allusion to the alchemy involved in the alloy between collective art, public space and political urgency.
2- The mantras (“regain strength”, “shake until you lose control”, “move in silence”) that kept the bodies dancing for 24 hours during the exhibition “Conjuring the Horizon” that De Caro put on at the Mac Val Museum in January 2025. The action called ‘Alchemy against dark times’ was a powerful coven that, believe it or not, changed the course of the last elections in France.
De Caro records on paper, possessed by the energy of those dancing bodies (including her own) and by the voices of a genealogy of utopians who have imagined, debated, tried, failed, tried again, other ways of living.
And, at this point, it plays the role of a medium for a series of vibrations that shake the consensus about what should happen in an exhibition space and what interactions between works, bodies and perceptions are possible and desirable.
Like an inverted Rorschach test, instead of the images revealing signs of personality, it is the images that capture sensations no longer of individuality but of collective historical processes.
No element in De Caro’s universe is obvious or banal. From concept to collective spontaneous action, from there to concept again, to end up in artistic technique and start the cycle again, in a loop, to infinity.
A chromo-corpo-conceptual art is born. The effectiveness of its magic promises it a long and intense life.
Guadalupe Maradei February 2025
