Praxis is pleased to present Misshapes, a group exhibition by the Argentine artists Majo Caporaletti, Candelaria Fernández Coya, Emilia Hendreich, Belén López de Carlo y Francisco Ratti.
In Misshapes, what we perceive as real loses its natural form. Majo Caporaletti, Candelaria Fernández Coya, Emilia Hendreich, Belén López de Carlo, and Francisco Ratti collectively explore the distortion of everyday references as a means of communication. Here, deformity transcends negative connotations : it becomes a transformative process through which the artists comment on what surrounds us. Our present and our reality are in this exhibition filtered through fantasy.
How do we connect to each other? This is the question that traverses Belén López de Carlo’s series Millennials. Humans who do not see each other and humans who hold our gaze, forcing us to be voyeurs of a cold universe. Paintings that mimic the HD of the screen, echoing the paradoxical loneliness within our hyper-connected digital personas.. Characters that make us question how we choose to present ourselves at a time when our online profiles are an integral part of our personality.
Hidden among everyday landscapes, the figure of Emilia Hendreich (literally) appears. In an exercise of translation, the artist’s selfies transform into oil paintings on canvas. Emilia then lets us peek into her intimacy, her house, her neighborhood, her workshop, reflecting on the urgency of constant documentation. This urgency to capture every moment is perpetuated in Emilia’s work. These traces of everyday life, trapped in our cell phones and translated onto the canvas by the artist, compel us to question whether what we have in front of us is real.
In that space between digital life and tangible life, Francisco Ratti’s paintings emerge: Post-digital works, first conceived as drawings on a screen and then turned into canvases painted with acrylic. In this transposition, Ratti forces us to look twice: how do we view a painting? How do we view a screen? What is this that I have before me? His artworks explore the intersection where artistic imitation of the digital questions artificial intelligences’ mimicry of human creativity.
On the other side of a reality filled with information, Majo Caporaletti’s paintings appear: Women who look inward, stripped-down environments, animals that speak of a return to nature. This group of oils presents unfamiliar places to our eyes, which become accustomed to the atmosphere of mystery as contemplation progresses. Majo paints forces at rest, transmitting the moment of calm before or after the action. Her oils invite viewers to pause amidst the frenetic pace of daily life.
And what about the images that appear when we close our eyes? For Candelaria Fernández Coya, dreams are also part of our everyday universe, part of our imagination. Works where what we believe known is disrupted: Waving skies, stretched animals, distorted humans. These landscapes seem to hold a secret, the enigma of the dreamlike.
Misshapes brings together five contemporary Argentine artists who deform what we conceive as real. What we consider figurative, each of them approaches in an intimate and personal way. Their collective works encourage viewers to look beyond surface appearances, training our gaze to seek authenticity through these transformative distortions. Through these deformations, we learn about our own existence.
Text by Lucía Matusevich
