Fragility as Art: Marie Orensanz's New Exhibition at Ruth Benzacar

"Thinking is a revolutionary act" is the phrase carved in steel that stands as a sculpture facing the river in the Parque de la Memoria landscape. Significantly, this is a space conceived in memory of those who disappeared during the military dictatorship, when so many young people disappeared for the crime of thinking.

The challenging work of Marie Orensanz's work is composed of two contiguous blocks , like the pages of an open book, forcing the viewer-reader to decipher a deliberately problematized text. Because although simple and straightforward, nothing in this artist's work is. This is especially true in the way she presents the texts; the fragments of words that constitute the central core of her work. A unique way of integrating reflections and different approaches to the subject matter.

If in the 1970s the phrase embedded in her work in the Parque de la Memoria (Memory Park) already appeared in several of her drawings alongside other utopian phrases such as "Creative power communicates to all," the truth is that the passage of time and the circumstances the world is going through seem to have reoriented her thinking in the sense of a state of consciousness that has led her to meditate on fragility; the fragility of beings, of things, and of relationships. Hence "Fragility," the title of the artist's new exhibition at the Ruth Benzacar gallery .

A set of pieces that seems in tune with an era in which subjects no longer see themselves as strong enough to change the world. An era that has left behind the illusions that animated the 1970s when the artist arrived in Paris and still resonated with echoes of "Power to Imagination" and "Be Realistic, Dream the Impossible!" , the slogans of May '68 that marked the political dimension that conceptual art assumed in the following decade.

Orensanz's work has been permeated and affected from the outset by that time and the dimension of time in its transformative evolution. This exhibition particularly reveals this.

Being aware of our fragility. Reflecting, thinking, feeling. A word, a sensation, a moment, something we experience for a while. Where we go and how we protect ourselves. These are the reflections, in poem form, that introduce the visitor to the artist's most recent world and reflect a long series of vital, sentimental, and creative experiences accumulated throughout her life. All captured in a set of pieces that inscribe reflections on the various ways in which the feeling of fragility manifests itself. Curiously inscribed in steel.

We go beyond what we see... sharing our spirit , is what we read in the text carved into two steel planes open like the pages of a book . In the way the artist fragments sentences to problematize their perceptual meaning as a cipher that must be revealed.

On the ceiling of a small room that displays the schematic form of a house, one can read "Finding vital solutions in the imagination," a kind of breath in the face of the elements . Another openwork text reads "Uncertainty," while at the base of a stepped pyramid shape, one can read: "The strength of the spirit." One might think that the collection of works has been deliberately articulated in a sort of balance between hope and anxiety, manifested through a cold and distant aesthetic. An immaterial imprint, as immaterial as thought.

A small steel bridge is another of the refined pieces in this set that draws attention and is inevitably associated with the principle of transit. Is this our condition in life?

"We are passing through," the artist confirms. "We leave something behind, a trace. Minimal compared to everything we've experienced." It could be said, then, that this exhibition presents itself in a way as a legacy. A collection of reflections from an artist who, at 88, seeks to share through her art the wisdom of a life that allows her to interpret the present with deep concern.

The principle of reflective activity, essential to the practice of contemporary art that animates Marie Orensanz's work, is shared by Julio Grinblatt, an Argentine photographer based in New York and a neighbor in another room of the Ruth Benzacar gallery.

In two series of works exhibited there , Grinblatt presents new chapters of Uses of Photography , the long-standing inquiry into the nature of photography that has occupied him for decades and has allowed him to delve into both the singularity of the photographic image and the camera device and the radical innovations it brought to the system of representation.

Uses of Photography is composed of eleven diverse series. In each, the artist analyzes a different aspect involving the procedures and conditions of photography's production in relation to different stages of its development.

On this occasion, one of the series presented by Ruth Benzacar alludes to movement, its experimentation through photography, the point at which it becomes abstraction, and how it was approached in the early days of photography.

To do so, Grinblatt chooses a figure he identifies as a metaphor for photography: the mummy. Frozen in an instant, the Mummy (a sort of nod to Titans in the Ring, one of the television entertainments of his childhood) is a figure that, like the Medusa, represents the opposite of movement. Something like the "This has been" Barthes spoke of.

Grinblatt subjects the Mummy to a frenetic process of movement, reminiscent of silent films. The reference to Muybridge, the photographer who used several consecutive photographs of horses to depict movement, is evident.

He also mentions Jules Marey, the photographer who invented the "photographic shotgun," capable of taking twelve exposures in one second. Another pioneer of photography who emerges in Grinblatt's explorations of photography and movement is Nadar. The great photographer immortalized the images of Baudelaire, Sarah Bernard, Eiffel, Liszt, and Corot in portraits that replaced stage backgrounds with neutral ones that emphasized the figure in the foreground.

But what did this great portraitist do that caught Grinblatt's attention in this investigation? Precisely, he used some of these changes to erase the portrait's subject behind a disguise. A figure in a black mesh was designed to reveal gestures and emotions, thus referring to abstract issues rather than a specific person. Nadar not only concealed the models in a full black mesh, but also added white circles at their joints connected by lines and a black background. The photographs thus became abstract designs. What was seen was the drawing of the lines of the walking figure. This use of a disguise to show movement is what, for Grinblatt, connected his Mummy to Nadr, along with Muybridge and Marey as pioneers of movement in photography.

The other series that concludes his long project , Uses of Photography, is called Double Zero and refers to the uses of film in analog photography. Basically, because double zero corresponds to the numbers that indicate the beginning of the roll of negative.

"I've been working on this series since 1999," Grinblatt admits, "and it's only now that I'm finding its meaning. At the time, I was interested in the double-zero reference in relation to what was being debated at the time about how systems recorded the turn of the century. As an end or as a beginning? Double-zero could mean both, and at the same time, tremendous confusion on a global scale. But what ultimately shaped the series is what slips in, almost at random, in the first section of the film. When the photographer takes photos to be sure that the photo that appears with the number zero (that is, the first desired one) is a perfect frame that is not burned by the light."

Before reaching that first frame, that part of the film appears partially blurred by light and partially focused by the camera. This is what interests Grinblatt, a result of events beyond the photographer's control.

"It seems to me the closest thing to the possibility of a photograph that isn't staged or composed in advance," the artist defines. "Which is an illusion. Because I took it with a camera, with a roll of film, I chose it, I framed it, so that's a way of constructing a scene." In the artist's definition, they are a kind of objet trouvé that perception rescues for infinite and inexplicable reasons.

Fragility , by Marie Orensanz, and Uses of Photography -XI/ Cast – Double Zero , by Julio Grinblatt, can be visited until Saturday, June 21, from Tuesday to Saturday from 2 to 7 pm at Ruth Benzacar (Juan Ramírez de Velasco 1287).