Daniel Gigena
Praxis Gallery inaugurated its annual exhibition cycle with two shows by contemporary Argentine artists who, without any human figures in sight, explore the structures and destinies of nature: Romina Orazi (Trelew, 1972) and Gastón Herrera (La Plata, 1974). The exhibitions can be viewed until Thursday the 28th.
“Artists like Romina Orazi call to us with their works. You look at them, you smell them, you listen to them. And you feel the truth that lies there. You feel the beauty. We have a right to beauty, which is to say, a right to life,” asserts writer Gabriela Cabezón Cámara in her text for Visiones ancestrales sobre el futuro, which brings together Orazi’s drawings, paintings, fountains, and installations on the gallery’s ground floor. Also on display is the table and chairs covered in earth and moss, Double Landscape, featuring two views of the Impenetrable forest. Through color, landscape, and spiritual dimension, several works pay tribute to Nicolás García Uriburu, a pioneering artist of ecological awareness.
For some time now, Orazi has been exploring the power of life in animals and plants, and also that which threatens it. In his new exhibition, he focuses on embryonic formations, eggs, seeds, mosses, minerals, and water in constant circulation and transformation, offering the viewer a new perspective, one conducive to imagining futures, on matter. Small bronze potatoes, a swarm of bees forming a lemniscate (the symbol of infinity), the native fauna and flora of the Pampas plains, bromeliads blooming in ceramic “volcanoes,” and two fountains of allegorical inspiration are displayed before the protective figure of the jaguar Açaí (killed by poachers in 2025).
You have to go up to the gallery’s first floor to wander through Entre los árboles the exhibition-stroll conceived by Gastón Herrera. Centered on an exploration of drawing as territory, the artist recycles images from art history, graphic novels, documentary films, and freehand sketches, where the surroundings invite you to get lost or—as French artist Josepha Blanchet, Herrera’s partner, suggests—to lose your way. “Petit fôret” (Small Forest), a black ink drawing of a grove, was created on A4 sheets during a trip, later joined together to form a single landscape.
