Originally conceived in 1976 through the collaboration between Antonio Berni and Federico Manuel Peralta Ramos, the project reunited two radically different artistic sensibilities around a surprisingly coherent theme: the myths people construct to explain suffering, hope, luck, and death. The Fortabat exhibition revisits this remarkable encounter without reducing it to a nostalgic reconstruction. Instead, it reveals how these works continue to resonate within contemporary culture, where old rituals coexist comfortably with modern skepticism.

At the heart of the exhibition stands Berni's monumental “La Difunta Correa”, an installation that transcends painting by incorporating the visual language of popular devotion. Bottles of water, crutches, horseshoes, photographs, and countless ex-votos accumulate before the figure, transforming the gallery into something resembling both a shrine and a social archive. Berni does not mock faith, nor does he romanticize it. Instead, he exposes the fragile intersection where desperation becomes belief and collective imagination acquires physical form. The work remains one of the most compelling reflections on Argentine popular religiosity produced in the twentieth century.

What ultimately distinguishes “Creencias y supersticiones de siempre” is its refusal to separate high art from popular culture. Miracles, curses, relics, and sacred objects are presented not as relics of a forgotten past but as living expressions of collective psychology. The exhibition suggests that every society invents narratives capable of making the inexplicable bearable, and that artists are uniquely equipped to reveal the structures hidden beneath those narratives.

Nearly fifty years after its original conception, the exhibition feels unexpectedly contemporary. In an age still shaped by uncertainty, conspiracy, ritual, and symbolic thinking, its central question remains unresolved: perhaps superstition has never truly disappeared—it has merely changed its language.