Maymore

Our art gallery

María Torcello (Buenos Aires 1978)

Urunday wood sculpture. For María Torcello, it is essential to become conscious of our profound relationship with nature, of the patterns found in all living things, and of the connection between heaven and earth. She works with wood as an encounter with herself, as a process of transformation and transmutation to reach a higher plane of total fulfillment; a path achieved through polishing (in the case of the wood) and through learning and reflection (in the case of the human being) to attain a state of wholeness.

Santiago Porter (Buenos Aires, 1971)

From the series Bruma (Part Three). Photographs of Argentina, or a possible relationship between the appearance of things and their history.

The Bosques diptych serves as an example of the aim of this final stage of the Bruma series: the potential relationship between how things appear and their history, stemming from specific political decisions. It depicts dead forests in the province of Tierra del Fuego.

In 1946, seeking to expand the fur industry and generate economic revenue on the then sparsely populated island of Tierra del Fuego, the Argentine Navy imported 25 pairs of beavers from Canada. They were flown in specifically from the province of Alberta on an Argentine Navy aircraft. The project failed, and the animals began to multiply unchecked due to the absence of natural predators in Argentina.

Today, the beavers have caused an irreparable disaster. Their dams flood the land, causing the trees to die. The beaver reigns over what has become a graveyard for other species: dead trees, nests that are no longer there, and birds forced to migrate.

Anatole Saderman (Moscow, Russia 1904 – Buenos Aires 1993)

Anatole Saderman was a Russian photographer who became a naturalized Argentine citizen. He specialized in portraiture, particularly of intellectuals and artists, with whom he established a unique exchange contract (he believed that artists accepted being portrayed exactly as they were, without the need to be flattered in the photograph). It came to be said that an artist who had not been portrayed by Saderman lacked a public image—that he “was like a man without a face.”

The image depicts Raúl Veroni, an engraver and draftsman born in Milan in 1913 who lived in Argentina from a very early age, and where he passed away in 1992.

Rosana Schoijett (Buenos Aires, 1969)

Schoijett often explores and rediscovers materials and formats from the history of photography and art in general. In her silhouette portraits, she has developed a unique method of portrayal where the background is strongly illuminated, leaving the profile to appear in the style of the paper cut-outs characteristic of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Alejandro Lipszyc (San Martín, Province of Buenos Aires, 1971)

From the series Clubes de Argentina (Clubs of Argentina). Alejandro Lipszyc produced this series of photographs of neighborhood clubs between 2006 and 2009. These are technically and formally impeccable photographs: the framing is precise, demonstrating a great mastery of light. They are images that transport us, placing us within these spaces—empty at the moment they were captured, yet full of history and life from another era, another time.

Annemarie Heinrich (Darmstadt, Germany 1912 – Buenos Aires 2005)

She was a prominent photographer, born in Germany and a naturalized Argentine citizen, who addressed diverse themes throughout her 60-year career, establishing her own photographic language and style. She produced work for film, theater, radio, and fotonovelas, becoming one of the most renowned professionals in Argentina. During the 1940s and 50s, every personality in the entertainment world desired to be photographed by Annemarie. Although her dream was to be a dancer, as a photographer she captured the movement of dance in compositions with distinct lines and balance, where the relationship between figure and ground is perfect.

Andrea Nacach (Buenos Aires, 1975)

The box $42.75 NYC-BCN manifests as an intimate territory that links two opposing places and two destinations, addressing notions of space and time through photographic records taken in those two locations at different moments in the artist’s life.

Bruno Dubner (Buenos Aires, 1978)

The color planes are the result of a series of rudimentary camera-less photographic acts (acts such as fogging the paper or the negative) that reveal an attachment to a concept of photography that already seems like a thing of the past. The color planes are entirely arbitrary. Beyond the fogging procedure, Dubner decides nothing: not the color (which arises from an uncertain equation between exposure time and the brand of the sensitive product), nor the orientation of the work (which is conditioned by the orientation of the industrial papers). Likely as a reaction to the proliferation of digital cameras, Bruno decided to become slightly anachronistic and dedicate himself, lovingly, to experimenting with papers, negatives, and light; to rehearsing and re-rehearsing that magical act of printing light onto a surface.

Bruno Dubner was born in Buenos Aires in 1978. His work, exhibited in solo and group shows in Argentina and abroad, is part of numerous public and private collections. In 2005, he won First Prize at the Salón Nacional de Artes Visuales. In 2006, he received a mention in the Platt Prize. In 2008, he was selected for the Klemm and Deloitte contemporary photography prizes. In 2009, he was selected for the ArteBA-Petrobras prize. He lives and works in Buenos Aires.

María Torcello (Buenos Aires, 1978)

Sculpture in reclaimed urunday wood. This work is part of a series that takes the organic form of the seed as a metaphor for life. “All the potential is there and, in the same way that a seed becomes a tree, our physical-material being becomes spirit if the right conditions are met.”

Santiago Porter (Buenos Aires, 1971)

From the series Bruma (Mist), Part I. Photographs of Argentina, or of a possible relationship between the appearance of things and their history.

This first stage of the series focuses specifically on the appearance of certain public buildings in the city of Buenos Aires. These are nine buildings constructed in the city between the late 1930s and the early 1950s, each representing a different aspect of Argentina’s social and political life. The artist concentrates specifically on the facades, treating them as if they were portraits to reveal the different layers of history accumulated within that weathered architecture.

Santiago Porter was born in Buenos Aires in 1971. His work, exhibited in solo and group shows in Argentina and abroad, is part of numerous collections, both public and private. In 2002, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and was also awarded a grant from the Fundación Antorchas in Buenos Aires, in addition to being invited to participate in the visual arts residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada. In 2007, he received a grant to participate in the Intercampos III program at the Fundación Telefónica in Buenos Aires and won the first prize for photography from the Sociedad Central de Arquitectos of Buenos Aires. In 2008, he won the Petrobras-Buenos Aires Photo prize. He is the author of the books Piezas, published in 2003, and La Ausencia, published in 2007. He lives and works in Buenos Aires.

Rosanna Simonassi (Buenos Aires 1974)

La caja recoge la serie completa de obras en las que la artista reconstruye a modo de autorretrato casos que involucran la muerte de mujeres y de los cuales existen registros fotográficos o documentación visual de dominio público. A partir de la lógica del expediente policial y utilizando un medio efímero como soporte mi intención es reproducirlos a tamaño real evocando tanto la escena y registro original como la sordidez y desafección contenidas en su publicación. La serie completa fue realizada entre 2012 y 2013 en Buenos Aires y sus alrededores.

Santiago Porter (Buenos Aires, 1971)

From the series Bruma (Mist), Part II. Photographs of Argentina, or of a possible relationship between the appearance of things and their history.

In the second stage of this project, between 2008 and 2011, Santiago Porter photographed sites, monuments, and structures in response to the idea of how many monuments created to commemorate specific events eventually become obsolete. How much of these images allows us to recognize the history of antinomies and violence they hide? It is here that photography becomes the suitable tool to represent these ideas upon which the artist works.

Carolina Magnin

Timeline aborda el pasado más contundente: el de aquellos que ya no están. A partir de una filmación realizada entre los años 30 y 40, hallada por azar en un placar familiar, la artista concibió una instalación en la que fotogramas ampliados, proyecciones, vestigios digitalizados de viejos formatos analógicos y objetos antiguos se convierten en una singular recreación de lo que ella denomina “la fragilidad de la pequeña memoria”.

En esas evasivas cintas fílmicas, Magnin encontró a tíos y abuelos en gestos, movimientos, reuniones familiares y días de playa en una Mar del Plata extrañamente próxima. Tras digitalizar las películas, Magnin editó ese producto “numérico”, seleccionó algunos fotogramas especialmente dotados de misterio -el rostro evanescente de su abuela, la silueta a contraluz de un tío, recortes superpuestos del mar-, los imprimió en planchas de duraclear (el material que se utiliza en las radiografías) y los colocó, para su exhibición, en antiguos visores de placas radiográficas. Todas estas imágenes están coloreadas digitalmente por decisión de la autora, interesada en dejar constancia de que hubo un traspaso de un soporte a otro: una apropiación que, inevitablemente, imprime tantas huellas como enigmas. De igual modo como lo hace el ejercicio de la memoria, esa arqueología construida a partir de indicios erráticos, cuyos mecanismos recrea la poética de Magnin. “Somos lo que somos, por el pasado que nos trasciende”, recuerda la artista.

Gabriel Valansi (Buenos Aires, 1959)

For Gabriel Valansi, the truth of photography lies not in representation, but in its ability to capture an atmosphere—a certain way of being within a certain period of time. “Historia del Mundo” (History of the World) is an achronological succession of images taken from an encyclopedia originally published in collectible installments, here mounted in a kinetic continuum in the form of a frieze. Constructed in lenticular material, it directly evokes Aby Warburg’s monumental unfinished work: the Mnemosyne Atlas. By stripping the images of all text and leaving them floating in their ambiguity, the objective is to find the secret anima that drives events—that which unfolds beyond the narrative of History. It alludes to a memory of history made of residual recollections that appear within each of us without order, again and again—appearing and disappearing imprecisely. More than a history or a visual narrative, it is a device for contemplating the immense evocative power of images. They are fleeting, dark images on the threshold of perception, encouraging us to discover truth through our own personal experience.

Nicola Costantino (Rosario, 1964)

Her artistic career began with a series of experiments involving taxidermied and vacuum-packed animals. Through casting techniques, she created pieces and sculptural ensembles that included chained chickens, unborn foals and calves squeezed into pipes and boxes, and pigs hanging or gathered into a ball.

In 2006, after meeting Gabriel Valansi, she ventured into photography. Initially, she created her own versions of works by other artists that interested her. Nicola en el Lago (Nicola in the Lake) is one of these, inspired by Renaissance depictions of the Baptism of Saint John. Since then, the artist has worked permanently with her own body and image: whether using it as a medium to reference the surrealist tradition of modern photography, recording herself as an actress in her own life, or embodying a multiplied version of the myth of Eva Perón at the Venice Biennale.

In short, the trajectory of Costantino—creator of an uncomfortable and subversive body of work—questions the boundaries between good and evil, life and death, through an aesthetic of the abject. Her work inhabits that blurred frontier where the ominous and the uncanny disguise themselves in the clothing of the everyday, yet always with an indisputable formal beauty and impeccable craftsmanship.

The Origin of the Substance Will Import the Importance of the Origin

Monica Heller (Buenos Aires, 1975)

Heller immerses us in a sensory landscape that shakes our perception of reality and invites us to question the bodily, imaginary, and cognitive limits of the human, in times dominated by the suspicion of its decline as a civilizing paradigm.

The product of an anthropomorphism that subsumes the animate and the inanimate until they become indistinguishable, Heller’s 3D animations construct a cast of paradoxical and absurd situations where humor, the abject, social satire, and metaphysical spatiality converge. Her protagonists, trapped within infinite time loops, repeat cycles of actions through which they build themselves, fall apart, and rise again. El origen de la substancia importará la importancia del origen (The origin of the substance will import the importance of the origin) thus offers an insistent choreography that rejects any form of narrative unity. It is a landscape of vibrant iterations in which both the neurotic recurrence of the .gif format and the use of repetition—employed by various 20th-century avant-garde movements to expose the audience’s sensitivity to a possibility of emancipatory escape—resonate.

This work was part of the submission selected for the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022.

Marcelo Brodsky (Buenos Aires, 1954)

The photographer is a solitary creator. He carries his instrument and watches; he chooses a fragment of reality, places it within the rectangle, and shoots. Thought accompanies every movement of the finger on the shutter. The eye interprets reality, encodes, decodes, constructs, deconstructs, invents. The eye observes, investigates, searches in solitude for the exact moment; it senses, selects, imagines.

The photographer’s solitude is repeated during the editing process when, the shooting concluded, it is time to choose the best images. It is an intimate, personal process involving years of experience, sensitivity, intuition, the books pored over, the exhibitions visited, the dialogues about other images that were laid out on the table, and one’s own path pointing toward the next step: selecting just one.

The visual dialogue between two creators breaks the focus on the author’s “I” and proposes something different. What determines each decision is no longer just the rehearsals, the personal projects, or the development of a discourse consistent with previous and future works in the construction of an individual visual identity. Correspondence is not a soliloquy; it is sustained by an interlocutor—an “other” who also watches, who also chooses, who also photographs, draws, and thinks.

Not words, but images as a form of communication.

Rosanna Simonassi (Buenos Aires, 1974)

This work was produced using a medium-format analog camera. The photographs were taken in the early morning in a rural area in the west of the Province of Buenos Aires.

Santiago Porter (Buenos Aires, 1971)

The year 2001 was not just the beginning of a new century in Argentina. In the country’s collective subconscious, it was and remains a permanent scar: economic and political crisis, piquetes (roadblocks), cacerolazos (pot-banging protests), repression… This series of photographs by Santiago Porter—who was then an editorial photographer for the newspaper Clarín and a frontline witness to those events—serves as the memory of those days.

Bruno Dubner (Buenos Aires 1978)

The contact is a sensitive surface that carries matter-light; a surface that, in the act of receiving light, perceives, and by physically retaining that light, is physically modified. Under dark conditions, the contact does not retain lines and planes of figures, but rather zones of temperature-color. Yet, this does not make the resulting image abstract. It is non-formal or non-figurative. Nonetheless, as the title of the exhibition suggests, the contact bears witness to something. These photos focus on that primary act (which is in itself testimonial), and by privileging the moment of capture, they determine its interest in corporality. But this interest includes another element, even more important. Traversing a dark room with the contact to capture light is an exploration, on an intimate scale, of what happens to the contact as a sensitive body and what happens to the photographer’s body while performing the action. “Testimonio de un contacto” (Testimony of a Contact) means, literally, “that which a photographic contact can testify to,” but also that “it bears witness to the fact that a contact took place (between two or more things).” The contact of the body of the contact and of the photographer’s body with the non-formal aspect of space implies, therefore, and ultimately, a commitment to the body in its most concrete aspect—prior to its capacity to decode the symbolic—which would be the opposite of the abstract body as it is being modulated by virtual connection technologies.

Santiago Porter (Buenos Aires, 1971)

From the series Bruma (Mist), Part III. Photographs of Argentina, or of a possible relationship between the appearance of things and their history.

For the development of the project’s third stage, the artist traveled across the country to photograph specific sites where the landscape’s physiognomy has been altered both by political decisions and by the weight of history itself. Here, the premise remains the same: how the eventual relationship between how things look and their history can potentially provide an image powerful enough to account for this past. These images arise in opposition to the saturated shots and the literalness of the photographs of public buildings and certain monuments and structures included in the previous chapters. The idea is to work with the same ambition—that some of that density might still be perceptible in these landscapes, even despite the absence of recognizable elements. It serves as a common thread that underlies all the photographs in the series, from the first one taken in 2007 to the last one included in this chapter.

Santiago Porter was born in Buenos Aires in 1971. His work, exhibited in solo and group shows in Argentina and abroad, is part of numerous collections, both public and private. In 2002, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and was also awarded a grant from the Fundación Antorchas in Buenos Aires, in addition to being invited to participate in the visual arts residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada. In 2007, he received a grant to participate in the Intercampos III program at the Fundación Telefónica in Buenos Aires and won the first prize for photography from the Sociedad Central de Arquitectos of Buenos Aires. In 2008, he won the Petrobras-Buenos Aires Photo prize. He is the author of the books Piezas, published in 2003, and La Ausencia, published in 2007. He lives and works in Buenos Aires.

Érica Bohm (Buenos Aires, 1976)

The artist focuses her exploration on the ways we interact with light and time. The image itself mutates depending on the duration of the exposure.

Her work seeks to construct a fiction through different chapters revolving around astronomy and science, literature, and science fiction cinema. These interests orbit the imagery of space and its multiple approaches and representations: images of landscapes dreamed of but hardly explored or experienced by humans, formed instead from the intersection of various scientific theories and different narratives, such as science fiction novels and films. This fiction glides over the history of space conquest, the idea of time travel, the construction of the astronaut as a 20th-century hero, the circulation of images captured by state-of-the-art probes, the metaphor of seeking outer space as an escape from reality and, above all, the excuse to portray the journey that images make among us, to or from us.

Alberto García-Alix (León, 1956)

This black-and-white analog photograph belongs to Paraíso de los creyentes (Believers’ Paradise), a visual lecture developed for his retrospective exhibition at the Reina Sofía Museum. In it, Alberto García-Alix achieves a unified narrative between text and image, with the word serving as the central axis and a guide to organizing the author’s abstract thought, and the photography serving to enhance the imagination and invent new realities. In fact, his gaze transforms reality, revealing his path toward abstraction.

Look at this man. Immersed in his despondency, he looks at himself. There is a vibrant silence. It is the clown before the performance. He knows that in a few moments the lights will come up and he must laugh. He cannot. He dreams of his crime. A crime buried in this nothingness, where exhaustion reigns over a thousand lost hours. A visible crime upon dead time. This is the stage. A purgatory of words. Within them lives the light I stole from my days. They redeem what my eyes saw. (…)

The result is the personal quest that permanently surrounds García-Alix’s work: a reflection on life, experiences, fears, and longings—a subsequent personal analysis turned into his own confession.

Manolo Yllera (Madrid 1971)

Analog photograph, hand-printed.

Juan Carlos Martínez (Badajoz, 1978 – Madrid, 2023)

Juan Carlos Martínez’s work insists on reconstructing for itself a space where the gaze operates in a singular manner. As settings where fragments of reality are staged, his photographs maintain an evident testimonial dimension. However, subjected to a model of a furtive—and at times directly voyeuristic—gaze, their nature is far from that of an improvised capture. On the contrary, these works constitute a precise search for those environments where the photographer’s revealing gaze is forbidden and where the withdrawal from the public domain constitutes the very substance of the act.

Caraballo-Farman (Leonor Caraballo and Abou Farman, Buenos Aires–Iran)

For years, the artists gathered images from the internet of people from all over the world in dramatic situations. Their collective presence somehow anesthetizes us, distancing our empathy from that pain. The artists worked intensely—isolating, scaling, outlining, manipulating, and lighting each individual’s face—to convey the intensity of suffering. They relied on the chiaroscuro technique and printing on fabric, treating them as if they were portraits.

Landscapes without Memory

Joan Fontcuberta (Barcelona 1955)

Joan Fontcuberta tests the notion of representation through the seductive game of optical illusion. The work depicts a landscape that is seemingly real yet non-existent, created using a computer program for military use. The software, Terragen, was designed to build three-dimensional models of photorealistic quality by using two-dimensional sources, primarily maps. However, Fontcuberta “tricks” the software by feeding it images of famous oil paintings—in this case, by Kandinsky—thereby forcing it to interpret the paintings as real maps.

Bruno Dubner (Buenos Aires, 1978)

Through his images, Dubner takes on the task of photographing light. In this series, darkness prevails. Upon the deep and uniform black of the images, illuminated areas appear so faintly that they subtly merge into the shadows. With these images, Dubner proposes a reflection on the essential photographic act: photography becomes possible through the mere presence of the trace—undoubtedly the result of light falling upon the film, even if it is not recognizable as an object. However, the images do not only develop a conceptual premise; they also form a series that captivates and provokes through its simple and enigmatic beauty.

Bruno Dubner was born in Buenos Aires in 1978. His work, exhibited in solo and group shows in Argentina and abroad, is part of numerous public and private collections. In 2005, he won First Prize at the Salón Nacional de Artes Visuales. In 2006, he received a mention in the Platt Prize. In 2008, he was selected for the Klemm and Deloitte contemporary photography prizes. In 2009, he was selected for the ArteBA-Petrobras prize. He lives and works in Buenos Aires.

Rosanna Simonassi (Buenos Aires 1974)

Hand-developed analog photographs that attempt to reflect movement.

While the City Sleeps

Louise Crawford & Stéphan Guéneau (Escocia and Francia)

Crawford and Guéneau have been working together since 2000. Their primary interest lies in history and its impact on the landscape and urban space. Their large-format analog photographs are simultaneously artworks and documentation.

In the series While the City Sleeps, they investigate the cinematic possibilities of long-exposure night photographs, with the idea of creating an “alternative reality.” In doing so, they transform the familiar, allowing us to renew our gaze upon commonplace locations.

Cristóbal Palma (Oxford, 1974)

The artist, born in England but based in Chile, studied architecture before dedicating himself to the photography of spaces, architecture, and their relationship with humanity. These three images represent Chilean buildings.

Santiago Porter (Buenos Aires, 1971)

The series Piezas (Pieces) compiles ten years of photographs taken on the last day in the various houses where the artist lived between 1993 and 2003, at the moment of moving out. These spaces appear as stages where things have already happened forever. Or, as Daniel Molina wrote, they are the map of essential solitude—the only thing that remains behind the shifting appearance of unceasing time.

Santiago Porter was born in Buenos Aires in 1971. His work, exhibited in solo and group shows in Argentina and abroad, is part of numerous collections, both public and private. In 2002, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and was also awarded a grant from the Fundación Antorchas in Buenos Aires, in addition to being invited to participate in the visual arts residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada. In 2007, he received a grant to participate in the Intercampos III program at the Fundación Telefónica in Buenos Aires and won the first prize for photography from the Sociedad Central de Arquitectos of Buenos Aires. In 2008, he won the Petrobras-Buenos Aires Photo prize. He is the author of the books Piezas, published in 2003, and La Ausencia, published in 2007. He lives and works in Buenos Aires.

I’m looking for (#1 y 2)

Juan Carlos Martínez (Badajoz, 1978–2023)

Juan Carlos Martínez’s images work with the blurred boundaries of the representable, masculine identity, and the even more controversial matter of the confines of one’s own gaze in relation to the intimacy of others. His work possesses a great capacity to suggest, through photographic procedures, a landscape of events in which the dynamics of desire—as a gaze emerging from the other—is decisive.

Andrea Ostera (Salto Grande, 1967)

The investigation of the photographic medium—its conditions, limits, and possibilities—is the main axis of their projects. In this series, the artist dispenses with the camera and experiments with photosensitive papers: questions of physics and chemistry within light-sensitive materials compose a framework upon which the work develops.