Buenos Aires, February 2025.
By Kekena Corvalán.
View ¨Study for the Restoration of a Profile¨ Ana Gallardo, Ruth Benzacar Gallery.
Once again, from the complete and coherent vitality of her artistic practice, Ana poses a double question that permeates the discussions that most challenge us: What subjects should art address? This is related to another question that might seem old-fashioned or outdated, yet apparently, it is still relevant: What subjects should a woman artist like Ana address?
This exhibition presents a piece from a series that recovers seven oil paintings by her mother, Carmen Gómez Raba. Each painting combines embroidery, a ceramic piece (created by her daughter and granddaughter, Rocío Gallardo), and drawings. The installation is not merely on the wall but on another canvas that spans the room, from the historical complicity of creating the context for the maternal painting to be inserted—an image that is a small visual enigma of diffuse complexities.
Ana has spent years restoring the profile of her mother as an artist. Now, she implies what it means to restore, value, and bring to the present. With patience and literal saliva. Restoring as repairing, as healing, as profiling. Etymologically, to restore means to bring back to a standing position. She finds her mother as an artist and finds herself as if repairing Carmen’s works has restored a place that answers both initial questions. Moreover, she does so, as she always has, in the recovery of women working clandestinely, alone in the daily resistance
against the violence of the mandate “You can’t, You are not, You do not know,” a theme that today might appear softened but is not. Ana continues to discomfort, bother, and contradict, provoking virulent reactions, even within feminism itself. I assert, without fear of debate, that Ana has shaken the feminist art blanket more than any other artist recognized as such, especially if we think about the type of art that interests us, which has to do with altering a narrative, disturbing, creating confusion, breaking with the domestication of the gaze, and questioning the meaning of our actions and desires. Once again, and even within a “successful” trajectory (from CA2M, MAMBO, to MUAC), Ana questions the normative ideology of career, class, and gender concepts. It does not matter whether she is perceived as a cisgender, white, middle-class artist—if anything, I would say, welcome to that. If we review Ana’s career, her practices never fully fit into the art system, a sort of being inside while provoking questions about what it means to be an artist and what it means to be a woman artist, a gender artist, which she undoubtedly is.
Restoration of a Profile. Exhibition by Ana Gallardo. Ruth Benzacar Gallery.
Two dimensions for thinking about texts, contexts, and post-texts with Ana:
1. From Patronage to Presentation. Ana is living proof that the artist’s model as an ethnographer, the authorized spokesperson of society and often the most reliable, no longer explains a way of producing from a presumed fieldwork of contemporary art, but instead obstructs it, gentrifying struggles. Today, gendered art (and I repeat, Ana is for us a gender artist, from the beginning) can and should address any topic without exercising that Messenian and patronizing compression of social reality. This model of the artist as ethnographer, proposed by Hal Foster in the eponymous chapter of his book The Return of the Real (1996), has now been rethought from feminism through the debate on representing versus presenting. Today, from curating with affectivity and the exhibitions we engage in, we say: “We are not here to represent anything; we are here to expose our existence, re-existence, and desire,” delaying representational devices to question them as mechanisms of labeling, interpretation, marking, analysis, entropy and statistics.
Here lies Ana’s power and the sacrifice of cancellation from which she has undoubtedly risen triumphantly. I do not want to draw metaphors with sacrifice, but the act of cancellation (which we never agreed with, as we are not punitive) may enable us to discuss it. Ana’s sacrifice was a crossroads that was worth it for all of us. I am convinced she has saved us from the fire that was consuming us by facilitating a debate we struggled to begin, albeit at a personal and devastating price.
2. Materiality, Form, and Procedure. Ana’s work is loyal to the reclamation of diverted material. Restoration works with saliva. The mutual nurturing of materialities, the mother’s painting, and Ana’s tongue passing over the fabric repeatedly, cleaning it and restoring its dry, dull oil skin to a new shine and lighting it up, loving it. Ana always lights up. Always with dirty, ungainly, poorly handled materials, always searching for forms that have nothing to do with each other but will heal.
However, I do not want to leave the opacity behind, using it also as a mechanism for the clandestine. I repeat, this pixelated image that covers the gallery and is everywhere—the whimsical passe-partout that covers the exhibition walls—is the synthesis that underlies and explodes any possible truth regime. Even for that, Ana remains distinctive in contemporary art, unique in Argentine art. Ana takes the domestic realm to disrupt the domesticity of all our gazes.
“Still frame, video, Ana Gallardo reading. ¨Study for the Restoration of a Profile¨ Ana Gallardo. Photo Ruth Benzacar Gallery.”
Returning to the setting that adorns the walls of the Ruth Benzacar Gallery exhibition, it is upon this grand text (we spoke about what an artist should and can RIGHTFULLY talk about) that Ana stages the maternal stutter, her mother’s paintings, the voice that always hurts, the inheritance in the donation of lack. Carmen Gómez Raba, a gendered artist, was forced into it. I know this is a different meaning of the word “gender.” However, words are not innocent, and this “different meaning” is precisely what we dispute in feminism. Perhaps Ana’s entire work speaks to the use of language, the possibilities of saying, the place women and dissidents occupy, and our conditions for enunciation. Self-love and collective love: making work from the genre of still life and being a gendered artist are not that far apart. I repeat feminism taught us that too. Every day, from the verbal but exceedingly physical controversy that her exhibition at MUAC produced, I am struck by this double game of genders, since, in Ana’s case, disambiguation is demanded. What happens when one enters another regime of visibility is that the boundaries (just like with all the Carmen Gómez Raba figures in history). With the backdrop plotting, Ana recovers the axis of invisibility, taking a further step. Because she is politically invisible, she returns to being clandestine. Just like when she traveled to Guatemala, her work consisted of getting on a bus to bring supplies to armed comrades in the jungle, crossing Mexico’s southern border. Moreover, since I am here, I apologize, but I maintain from the outset that I cannot cancel Ana or anyone after all her work in Guatemala. I recovered the best definition of performativity I know: the unauthorized exercise of the right to existence that throws the precarious into political life. I read it from Judith Butler, but you, Ana, my friend, taught it to us.
From this definition, Ana has never ceased to be clandestine, politicizing her invisibility, even when negotiating with fairs and museums. And that is also unforgivable: saying it openly because it is a constitutive part of her work that does not fit into the art world.
Art history, politics, feminism—all in transition—this old fugitive we climb on, fleeing forward. In this intense present, the past is everything because it is our great machine of reality. We crash into networks against the dissolution of political narratives that fight for the unified truth regime, turning everything upside down, but the past is the only present. Furthermore, in it, we burn with vitality. What is at stake is the death of the past: its total disregard, what we call disenchantment. Ana, because her works dispute and tension this attempt to restore the vitality of the living through the attentive vitality of the dead, in reality, the dead woman: the history of Carmen and her production of still life paintings. All of us, here sighing, with Ana, once again.
View ¨Study for the Restoration of a Profile¨ Ana Gallardo, Ruth Benzacar Gallery.
