Ruth Benzacar Art Gallery presents “The hours do not understand me”, the seventh solo exhibition of Guillermo Iuso in our space.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a text by Santiago Villanueva and can be visited in room 2.
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Another year of secret action
By Santiago Villanueva
Standing like four marmots in the middle of arteBA 2024, facing the twenty works Guillermo Iuso was showing at this very gallery’s stand, a whirlwind of incoherent phrases, sharp-edged critiques, and tipsy cleverness circled the group—until one of us blurted out: It’s the wisdom of anniversary cards. That ancestral, popular wisdom—basic, comforting, and always just what people want to hear—suddenly offered itself as a lens through which to think about those pieces: visually compelling, yet strikingly out of sync with the surrounding artists. Cards offer comfort, we all thought at once; they console with tenderness. Iuso is different.
He’s the pied piper of the short text, but this time he’s putting himself to the test, unsettling the safety of language with a return to painterly craft—something he had, in a way, abandoned in the now-obscure exhibition Paintings from the Acid Section (Galería Sisley, 5–22 May 1993), which he doesn’t even list on his CV. Like a siren’s call, the disjointedness of the text pulls it away from its neat A4 formatting, unmoored from any industrial or medium-based standard. It becomes a small declaration of absolute expressive freedom—a “I do what I want, but not everything I want” attitude. What surrounds each phrase is what couldn’t be said—or more simply, the pure enjoyment of mess and composition. Painting is quiet, enclosed in the intimacy of the studio, and we love to fill it with words that defy the prison of the sentence. Sentences create loyal followers, but they rarely stick around.
The text falls short; it doesn’t grow or expand, but instead searches for a fit—for a form. So Iuso composes: like someone stepping back from a canvas, then leaning in again, covering one eye, measuring with a pen. In the gallery canvas—the kind that no one commands anymore, a regional salon or a stain competition long gone—he finds something: a constant circling around relief, as though that sensation might be found without drugs or alcohol. Relief, which in other times came from stamping paper with his mark or seal, is now found in the visceral rhythm of controlled dripping.
It’s as if Viviana Gorbato had read Iuso while writing her book The Competitors of the Couch—though chronologically, it’s impossible. For those unfamiliar: Gorbato was the star of Argentine investigative journalism in the ’90s, covering gay culture, erotica, spiritualism, and psychoanalysis. In 1994, she infiltrated the world of alternative therapies, declaring the end of traditional psychoanalysis and the rise of the tracksuit-wearing new therapy movement in Argentina. Prophetic dreams, sand therapies, hypnosis, and neurolinguistic programming—the latter, she claimed, was the most effective, especially for politicians, curing phobias in thirty minutes. She contrasted this with what she called “the militants of the body,” who ranged from yoga to dissociative diets. Iuso moves somewhere among all of this—perhaps helping some therapies be more effective. His whole oeuvre could be seen as an alternative therapy in itself. Iuso openly states that his psychoanalyst is a partner, an ally. A growing enterprise. And his own is another, running in parallel, like an alternate route.
How many insecurities fit into one painting? How many good and bad decisions? When to stop? Or even earlier: how to decide the dimensions—how many centimetres wide, how many tall? What’s the shortcut to those fascinating zones—more captivating than the rest—but that can’t be repeated or expanded? Iuso and Argentine painting are a beautiful problem to ponder. Because it’s a problem that must be stated: Can heterosexuality disorient? I believe it can, but I’ll say no more. I’ll just leave this here: Iuso taking on scale—working big—throws a twist into the moment and helps us lose the thread. He’s always said he prefers words to painting. That words help him live more than painting does. And that’s partly because he painted for ten years and, in his own words, “I never liked what I did. The paintings were huge. I’d start with oils, then add synthetic enamel, and they’d end up weighing 15 or 20 kilos. I used to weigh them.” He weighed his paintings, documented them, reloaded them with more material to give them heft—they became something else entirely. Until two friends said to him: “The work is the other part.” And that “other part” was the lists, the words, the phrases—that universe we’ve recognised for twenty-four years as quintessential Iuso. But now, with these new canvases, everything gets mixed up again: the layered impulse of the adolescent painter, still free from adult concerns, merges with the Iuso of ancestral greeting-card wisdom. A happy combination, bringing to mind César Magrini’s words from 1993: “For him, creation is a game committed to the deepest part of the creature, its enlightening testimony.”
Iuso calls secret action any studio practice where he alone determines the measured or excessive operations applied to a surface—the tone, the off-tone. Phrases come in a rush, get scribbled down, and never change. Paint shifts under the effects of his autofiction-fuelled enthusiasm. And finally, there’s the moment of placement, the most crucial one: when the phrase finds its gap. It’s the painting that destabilises the phrase, not the other way around. We need a prison; Iuso spent over two decades researching the constraints of the list, the cut-off text, the brief utterance. Now the prison is one of composition—a painter’s dilemma.
Many outdated words come to mind when describing these works. Iuso has no agenda. And that saves him. The gallery’s website even presents him as an artist who “constructs a narrative about being a man, an adult, and heterosexual in Argentina from the 1970s to the present.” Brushing time backwards, luck and the whimsy of a beginner professional.
