Imán is Stella Ticera’s first solo exhibition as a guest artist at Ruth Benzacar Art Gallery.
“I’m intrigued by the concept of the word IMÁN (magnet) as a generator of attraction, observing that what it draws to itself goes beyond good or evil, beauty or ugliness. It’s a function that is inevitable, intrinsic to its own action.
Where are we? What do we wish to gather amid chaos? And what comes together inevitably?”
— Stella Ticera
The exhibition consists of six drawings and one video, presented in Gallery Room 2.
Opened: March 11, 2022
Reality
The group of works that make up Imán are created with graphite pencil, fiber pens, and India ink on paper.
I worked through a variety of gestures and modes of action that operate by layering — as if nothing ever truly ends — connecting to time through a process of making in segments. Reconstructing a situation from the unconscious dismantles space, completing it only intermittently.
Everything that happens within these works stays within me — sometimes as a treasure, sometimes as something that stagnates and cannot escape.
I’m intrigued by the concept of IMÁN as a generator of attraction, observing that what it draws to itself goes beyond good or evil, beauty or ugliness. It’s a function that is inevitable, intrinsic to its own action.
Where are we? What do we wish to gather amid chaos? And what comes together inevitably?
In the productive chaos of work, a retrospective book on the life and work of Rosario-born artist Leónidas Gambartes came into my hands.
Recognizing his practice as a kind of primitive action — and understanding the morphology of his drawings — helped me think about space and the connections between figures as a whole, and within that whole, how each finds its place and form. Thousands of textures and tiny lines construct figures that hide messages and emotional codes, concealed within the act of making.
These characters, dialogues, and settings are mixed, shuffled, and rearranged within a thorny space that attempts to be stronger than they are. The narrative in these works is no more important than the physical sensation that their construction proposes.
The figures become a means of interpreting the temperature of their bodies at the moment of creation — their vitality in confronting the inevitable arrival of tragedy.
Within this body of work, linked to the gesture and action of turning a two-dimensional surface into a space of layered emotions and temperatures, video art becomes a tool that allows me to narrate passages of transformation — where matter, under my manipulation, changes its limits and states, to tell us about the becoming of things, of life.
Stella Ticera, February 2022
Barro y miel [Mud and Honey]
Sitting on a chair, sitting on the floor, crouched down, with the fan on, motionless, with a distant gaze, standing, bent over herself, drawing for hours — that’s how I saw Stella work in her studio.
The only analogy I can make — neither clever nor subtle — is of a crouched animal: a large, slender creature poised to strike.
Its prey — which it attacks in a swift, violent burst — is the material that forms her work, in which, through that impact, figures begin to appear and environments take shape.
Spaces that take on body — both a record of an experience and an experience in themselves: a formal and personal exploration of the world.
A world that rises and is destroyed again and again in the creative process of research into the dynamic tensions between the internal and the external.
The predator that bites the neck of its prey leaves something of itself behind — the tension in its muscles, the movement of its body parts, its physical effort — but also something of another kind.
Vulnerability is the counterpart of intuitive surrender to a new configuration. No animal is more vulnerable than in the exact moment before it attacks.
The valley is sticky; the low pressure envelops us and makes us walk close to the ground.
Dragged by the current, we witness a birth.
An animal says farewell to its young.
A glimmer rises from the black of the wet earth — luminous signals of courtship and warning.
Water hyacinths float, drifting in the restless current, almost within reach. The entire surface is covered in lichens.
A reflection fades like smoke — one can never look at the same river forever.
A rhythm of its own, a language that Stella keeps building.
An invisible shell that breaks and hardens at once.
The body’s vital pulse.
A language taking shape.
Something to ward off fear.
Something that turns this afternoon into something else.
A spell against the dark.
A matter of faith.
A young and brilliant wind.
Elías Leiro / 2022
Stella Ticera
Born in Santa Fe, Argentina, in 1999.
In 2017 she graduated from the School of Visual Arts with a specialization in audiovisual studies.
In parallel, she took dance and theater classes with various teachers.
Between 2018 and 2020 she participated in the Curadora Residency (San José del Rincón, 2018), Crudo Arte Contemporáneo (Rosario, 2019), and Artistas por Artistas (Buenos Aires, 2020).
In 2020 she received a grant to participate in Talleres Abiertos de Boca de Fuego at Munar Arte (Buenos Aires, 2020–2021).
She has presented individual and group exhibitions, including:
LLaverguoqui (Constitución Gallery, 2021), La Boca Arrancada (Munar Arte, 2021), PrrrMMM (PM Gallery, 2021), Video Installation at the Biennial of Young Art (Santa Fe, 2018), Piernas sin Piernas (URRA, Buenos Aires, 2018), Invisibles y Salvajes (Museo Provincial de Artes Visuales Rosa Galisteo, Santa Fe, 2017), Psíquica Curiosa (Performance, Fuga Gallery, Santa Fe, 2019), and Instantaneísmo (solo show, Fuga Gallery, 2018).
Her work is built from the symbolic and emotional layering of what happens around her.
Translating these forces into the languages of drawing, video, or performance allows her to confront dreamlike and chaotic spaces within a single support.
“I believe in the power of what is in motion and subject to change, in the information of the body as a starting structure, and in the imminence of events as something to work with.”
She lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Elías Leiro
Born in 1995 in Ciudadela, Buenos Aires.
He holds a BA in Arts from the University of Buenos Aires.
In 2017, he participated in the ABC Contemporary Art Grant and in the first residency of the International Poetry Festival of Rosario.
In 2021, he was a guest artist at Munar Residencies.
In 2020, he published his first book No me gusta que me toquen en las fiestas (I Don’t Like Being Touched at Parties) with Ediciones Neutrinos.
He has taken part in group exhibitions such as Muestra de Residentes Ballet (Munar, 2021) and Full Feng Shui (Munar, 2021).
He has also curated several projects, including Estacionamiento Emocional by Marcelo Estebecorena (Munar, 2021) and Un Paisajecito by Julián Matta and Hernán Kacew (Librería Planex, 2021).
