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MEMORIA ANUAL ANNUAL REPORT
Florencia Böhtlingk, Autorretrato, 2015, óleo sobre tela / oil on canvas, 70 x 50 cm. Pp. 16/17— La vida, 2018, vista de exhibición / exhibition view. Phs: Ignacio Iasparra. Gentileza de / Courtesy of HACHE
Florencia Böhtlingk (Buenos Aires, 1966) exhibited work at HACHE for the first time in a show curated by Alejo Ponce de León. Held in both of the gallery’s rooms, the exhibition of an artist active on the local scene for over twenty-five years featured the results of her most recent pictorial experiments. The works were varied not only in size but also in genre—from the self-portrait to the landscape—and medium—oil paint, acrylic, and watercolor; Böhtlingk’s wide palette is deployed in paintings that dwell on geography—particularly the river landscape—a recurring concern in her work from recent years. The show coincided with the release of her second book of watercolors—this one on the Río de la Plata, whereas the first, Misiones, focused on that northeastern province. According to the exhibition text, the scope and eclecticism of these ENG
works do not reflect an anthological or retrospective intent or attempt to act as a “style sampler,” but rather form part of an artistic strategy aimed at capturing from different perspectives vida (life), the show’s name. And by “life” the artist seems to mean something very specific and energetic, something characterized precisely by not belonging to the art world, that is, by openness, a compulsive bounty, and a desire not at all euphoric but in constant motion. That is what the show’s curator argues when he describes Böhtlingk’s art in terms of negation and contrarianism. “Refusing to look within art’s apparatus in order to make art is what organizes her work, its essential stance.... This is a show of painting point-blank. Perfectly contrarian painting that made the formidable sacrifice of being itself so that everything else could exist within it.” Turning painting into a hospitable and generous setting is, then,
tied to the decision to go outside of it in search not of exception and adventure but of otherworldly worldliness, naturalized strangeness on the basis of constructed or hard-earned innocence. Thus we see river landscapes (Las Islas, los Restos Umbanda, el Paraná) interspersed with a series of self-portraits both sullen and placid as if they were depicting the circular passing of the seasons—no aim, no origin, a mutual exchange between artist and environment. “What we have here is not, then, gradual honing towards pictorial perfection, but rather an unending conversation with the world and with the world that that very painting yields,” argues Alejo Ponce de León. And we might add that that world yielded by Böhtlingk’s painting posits a singularity that is not consumed by experience precisely because it provides the viewer with a different and strange way of looking at the world.