22/04/21 - The exhibition Terapia, which is being currently presented by MALBA, crosses the boundaries between art, psychoanalysis and madness in Argentina. It is an extensive exhibition (more than 200 works), whose montage alters our perception of the white cube because it proposes the total occupation of the walls. A way of displaying the artworks that Gabriela Ranger, director of the museum, adopts after the pandemic. The curatorship, forced to focus on the museum's heritage (access to works from abroad is prohibited), opted for the permanent collection and for “invisible” artists with works in Argentin.

From all this, we choose a curatorial nucleus in which women predominate, although (luckily) freed from the tag "feminist".

In the dressing room, by Gertrudis Chale (1939)

Technique: oil on wood

With a surrealist drawing (surrealism is present in the entire exhibition) of exquisite lines and strange beauty, In the dressing room, by Gertrudis Chale, is displayed along with the humor of the watercolorist Fermín Erguía. Elena Oliveras refers to Fermín Erguía (with a painting of unstable and ambiguous beauty) as a representative of the pornographic in the art world (not for nothing in the exhibition this work belongs to the curatorial nucleus of sex). We cannot fail to mention that Erguía's Untitled (1974) is a true surrealist metaphor. This bare foot / body on an armchair (it could be the armchair of a psychoanalyst) is a brutal image that does not correspond to something real or known, but is monstrous, provoking a diabolical attraction in us.

The outdated concept of beauty, or the weakened ideal of beauty, is demonstrated in the drawing of Mildred Burton with his wife / plant with a leaf  of cannabis (maybe?) in her hand. With total freedom of expression, the artist introduces us to an enigmatic region where the hidden has been revealed by presenting a fruity head that eclipses our vision and leads us to think of someone in a disturbed state of mind.

The eccentricities of Dane Eirwell, by Mildred Burton (1983)

Technique: ink and graphite on paper

Psychoanalytic practices have been part of the Argentine middle-class culture for more 70 years, resulting almost like a cult, and art does not fail to reflect it in this way.