Catalina Chervin at the ODA gallery
Argentine artist Catalina Chervin is showing a show titled La realidad está en los detalles (Reality Is in the Details) at the ODA gallery, at Paraná 759, first floor, curated by María José Herrera. According to Clarín, the show brings together drawings, engravings and sculptures made with a very meticulous technique.
About twenty works share the rooms. Some are recent and others are several decades old. The curator chose to take the original series apart so that each piece can be seen on its own, and that choice strengthens the way the eye moves through the space.
The gallery's simple architectural lines act as a contrast to the artist's webs of ink. Seen from afar those webs look like stains; up close they turn out to be a fabric of tiny beings, fragmented bodies and unsettling landscapes.
Ink, graphite and walnut stain
Chervin works on paper with a technical pen and builds, stroke by stroke, skies, cliffs and creatures piled on top of one another. Her engravings, although very different from her drawings, fully claim their own authorship. That meticulous method demands patience and a gaze very close to the paper, where each figure is a small being with its own gesture.
Only one series, Piel descartada (Discarded Skin), is shown together on one wall. It is also the exception to the artist's usual palette, which moves between white, black and grey. In those works, walnut stain, an old dye made with walnut oil that Chervin rescued, is added to graphite and ink to compose strips of flayed skin.
Gauze, silk and fragments of engravings glued under a drawing add transparency and porosity. For that reason, even within a range of greys, color is not missed.
Two suspended resin sculptures
The novelty of the show is her most recent experiment: two resin sculptures hanging in the air of the room. According to Clarín, they are Chervin's newest attempt to take the matter of drawing into the third dimension.
The work rests on emptiness, as certain Eastern artists do, building the image from what is absent and not from what is seen. The title follows the same logic and puts side by side two ideas that seem opposed at first glance: reality and detail.
Chervin herself describes her work this way: “My drawings are also cut strokes, torn papers,” she says, and she speaks of subtle lines that scream from the depths.
A career between two cities
For more than three decades Chervin has split her life between Buenos Aires and New York, a city that sheltered her. She recently received, from the Salón, the Premio Nacional a la Trayectoria Artística (National Prize for Artistic Career), a recognition of a body of work whose coherence, according to Clarín, allowed the curator to separate the series.
The text that accompanies the show, signed by Herrera, places that work against the unrest of the present. The curator reads in the pieces individual states of mind and also the reflection of a humanity crossed by conflict, and notes that the drawing looks at the body from the skin inward.
Amid so much darkness, a light always appears. According to Clarín, that light runs through every figure and holds the gaze of anyone who stops in front of the papers.
If you go
La realidad está en los detalles, by Catalina Chervin, is at the ODA gallery, at Paraná 759, first floor, in downtown Buenos Aires. It is curated by María José Herrera and the rooms hold about twenty works including drawings, engravings and sculptures.
Clarín's article does not give opening hours, ticket price or closing date, so it is best to check with the gallery before going. If you want to see the full Piel descartada series and the two suspended resin sculptures, that is the route the exhibition sets out.
Source: Clarín
Stories worth sharing.
