"La Era del Peluche" (The Plush Era) is a solo exhibition by Argentine artist Gerónimo Damián Araquistain at the Cultural Center San Martin, located in Buenos Aires. The proposal revolves around a series of large-sized Spanish plush playing cards, whose objective is to offer an analysis of the significance of Spanish playing cards in our society and especially in Latin America.

Participating Artist: 

Gerónimo Araquistain 

Borderline Art Space, art gallery in Iași, presents an exhibition of drawing, poetry and video entitled "Forest Creatures", by artist Laura Partin, opened on April 12. Curated by Simona Vilău, the exhibition can still be viewed by phone reservation until May 11, 2023.

Performers Alice Monica Marinescu, Cabiria Morgenstern and cameramen Mihai Florea, Marcel Trifan were involved in the project, and the music was provided by Fetter (Jessica Tucker, new media artist and musician).

"Being a project both lived and imagined, Forest Creatures includes works of drawing, poetry and video, apparently incompatible. The correlation came naturally during the work. Trained as a graphic artist in Iași, in a school with respect for drawing, Laura Partin feels the need to perfect herself, to expand her area of interest for mediums and to always experiment with other ways of creating", we learn from Simona Vilău.

"The artist relies on the difference between the work in the workshop and its intimacy and the finished work, the exhibition, the message. She also relies on the complementary forces that arise from the text and from working with the camera, two other mediums she used in the realization of this project.

How many Laura Partins do we meet in this exhibition? At least four, projected into a room of mirrors. The pandemic helped her reformulate her goals and propose the same theme treated with the help of four different mediums: drawing with illustrative, magical-poetic notes, the video-performance with an ecological theme, the feminist poetry already contained in a volume published by The frACTalia publishing house and the theoretical work on the project, with explanatory notations and autobiographical references.

The creatures of the forest are a metaphor for transformation and suffering. The fear behind the suffering is immortalized in the portraits of innocent little girls, each lost in her own fairy tale world, populated by insects, fabulous characters and an apparent hardening of the self.

The ecological theme completes the experience and translates it into a worrying present, of global warming and climate change. Being aware of it or not, humanity has recently gone through at least three major episodes of humanitarian crisis, mediatized and experienced in an oversaturated digital collective", pointed out the curator.

Laura Partin is a contemporary artist born in Iasi, now living in Bucharest, who explores drawing techniques such as pencil on paper, watercolor and Chinese ink on canvas, but also uses performance (sometimes participatory), installation or video art. She studied Fine Arts, Art History and Theory at "George Enescu" National University of Arts in Iași, and between 2012-2014 she had a scholarship in Fine Arts at the Romanian Cultural Institute in Venice. In 2021, she obtained a PhD in Fine Arts at the University of Paris. Over the years, Laura has tackled topics such as gender stereotypes, the condition of migrant workers and concepts from social psychology such as cognitive dissonance or terror management theory. Her most recent project, Sfratto/Eviction (2020), exhibited in Rome, incorporated a video and a series of drawings about the eviction of Roma families from their homes in Romania between 2010 and 2020. Most recently, in the context of the pandemic, she became interested in the multimedia/performative potential of contemporary feminist poetry and time spent in nature as a form of introspective healing.

The exhibition is organized by Borderline Art Space through the AltIași Cultural Association and is part of the "Post-Human Escapes" project, co-financed by AFCN.

"Día de Campo" (Field Day) is a solo exhibition by visual artist Iosu Aramburu at Pasto Gallery in Buenos Aires. Iosu's work includes paintings that explore modernism in the Andean region, named after the area over the Andes Mountains and comprising a large part of South America, usually marginalized in the history of Latin American art. The avant-garde and the South American countryside dialogue in this proposal can be visited in the heart of the autonomous city of Buenos Aires.

Recently, at ArtEast Gallery Iasi, took place the opening of a new exhibition signed by artist Felix Aftene. The project presents 50 of his works, made in the serigraphy technique. The curatorial statement is signed by Dana Lungu, and presents aspects related to the artistic practice and concepts of the artist.

"In the present exhibition, Felix Aftene's challenge is in relation to serigraphy. He takes a 4000-year-old technique, which he appropriates, tests its limits, adapts it, domesticates it, polishes it like a lens through which he looks back at his own work. Selecting from the old cycles of reference works - the central character from Dali's Mustache, the idols and mythological characters from Falling in Time, the nudes and chimeras from Genesis, etc., Felix Aftene translates them into a new technical dimension, with new plastic vibrations. He thus rediscovers his own artistic path, the stages of creation and urges us to visit it in a different light. The exhibition is a real self-portrait of the author in serigraphy, because Felix Aftene never forgets his deep belief in the immortality of the figurative art and painting.

Beyond the self-referential stake, the exhibition is a tour in the aestheticization of a technique which, we must not forget, at its origins is a technique of multiplication. Of course, the present artist is neither the first nor the only one who undertakes the effort to ennoble the serigraphy technique, but the personal way in which he does it, the technical difficulties he overcomes, the complexity he reaches and the transition from the "graphic" effect to which is commonly assumed by the serigraphy to the effect of <<pictoriality>>, that Felix Aftene manages to achieve, gives it a special status, a privileged place in the history of this technique", stated the curator.

And the artist added: " (...) It is the first complete personal exhibition in this technique and I am convinced that it represents, from the point of view of exposure, only the beginning for me. And that's because serigraphy can't be limited to a millennial past, but will surely enrich its present and future forever, as long as passion, quality and the desire to create stories with the help of art are gathered in them".

FELIX AFTENE works in Iasi, but is known for a sustained artistic activity on the romanian and also the international art scene, in various artistic mediums, such as painting, sculpture, mural painting and new media. In 1996, he graduated Mural Painting from "George Enescu" Academy of Arts in Iasi. Since 2013, he is the president of the Iași Branch of the Union of Visual Artists in Romania.

In 2016, he obtained his PhD in Visual Arts at the "George Enescu" National University of Arts, with a thesis dedicated to contemporary visual arts. He had more than 40 personal exhibitions in museums and international art galleries in Austria, USA, Great Britain, Greece, Germany, Switzerland, France, Italy, Spain, Canada, Denmark, Hungary, Israel, and has various artistic distinctions.