María Venancio – “Leer en voz alta”

Reception: March 5th, 2025

_VIGILGONZALES Buenos Aires - Presidente Roque Saenz Peña 628 - P4 - Buenos Aires

 

_VIGILONZALES is pleased to announce the opening of Leer en voz alta, a solo exhibition by the young argentine artist María Venancio (Buenos Aires, 1994), which will bring together pieces that, in a rich and continuous reference Argentina's art history and international popular culture, articulate a hypnotic logbook of the art worker. In her encounter with everyday life and detail, María Venancio's multidisciplinary approach adopts paintings, hands, t-shirts, chairs and leaves as identifying elements.

María Venancio (Buenos Aires, 1994) holds a degree in Visual Arts from the University of the Argentine Social Museum. She is an artist who paints, draws, and writes. She participated with the collective Macu and Giuli in the UTDT Artists Program 2023-24, a group with which she received the Special Award at the Young Art Biennial for the research project Las palabras son cosas (2022-2023).

 

 

 

 

 

Her visual production observes and absorbs the city: the artist brings to the canvas what she saw on the street, filters what she read in a book or heard in a song. Her paintings look at other paintings, generating references and revisiting certain milestones in the history of Argentine art. Her work traverses a collection of representations in fragments that move persistently from one canvas to another. 

Reading aloud is an action that combines writing, reading and speaking. It is also a metaphor for thinking of ways to share one's own artistic production, and can thus become a gesture that brings the author closer to her own work.

The boundaries between the foreign and the local seem to blur to give way to an aesthetic conduct more in line with globalized contemporaneity: María Venancio's works are born from this fertile mixture, where the city of New York dialogues with folklore figures such as José Larralde and artists such as Marta Minujín, Pablo Suárez or Liliana Maresca. It is not just a matter of the will to quote, but of a genuine need to study, through these quotes, the traditions and experiences imprinted in the history of art. It is the same operation that Van Gogh does in 1886 when he paints the Torso of Venus and that, once again, the artist puts on stage in one of her works. Painting can then be seeing again, living again.

The power of the act of selection and collection lies in the gesture of taking a foreign territory as one's own by planting a flag, recognizing that the history of art is also being designed within the author and that it is at this exact meeting point - between the assimilation of culture and its realization - where we can understand her motivations and her ways of doing things. In a moment set to music by The Velvet Underground or The Rolling Stones, one can read a poem by the Mexican writer Fabio Morábito and not feel any contradiction.

Reading aloud is an action that creates a space of belonging and keeps it open, inviting the listener to get involved. Just like speech, painting enables error and any act that brings the present time. When the painter overcomes a mistake, there is no possible control, and it is there where painting as a medium can express its intrinsic qualities.