The exhibition is drenched in a deep pink hue that resonates with the sensuality and violence of the pieces. Códega uses unconventional pigments—banana, lemon, tar—on repoussé metal, leather, collage, and video. Her monsters, saints, and warriors move between the grotesque and the mythical, conjuring images of a soldier-skeleton fighting serpents or a bishop-menaced chimera with theatrical power.

Códega draws from pre-Columbian cosmology, medieval iconography, and Latin American muralism, yet everything feels fiercely personal. Her work resists the colonial canon by reviving marginalized visions—pagan, epic, and feminist. The materials themselves carry political force: burned pumpkin and crushed fruit evoke devoured bodies and territories.

Some of the strongest moments are sculptural: gourds split open like corpses suggest children killed in the War of the Triple Alliance, transforming organic matter into testimony. Barbero describes the works as “epic battles painted with lemon and tar,” a phrase that captures the balance of intimacy and fury at the core of Códega’s practice.

Ph: AURA Photo

The title “Jajan't”, inspired by a meme, synthesizes the essence of the show: that which should make you laugh but doesn't quite make you laugh. This ambiguous tone is reflected in the sculptures, representing bodies in tension and bewilderment states. From a dog with Crocs to migraine heads, Castro's works evoke images of contemporary culture and reconfigure the materiality of banal objects such as wicker canes, small commercial shelves, floral sponges, and rubber bands. These elements, commonly found in supermarkets or hardware stores, are combined with traditional art materials, creating a crossover that is key to Castro's work.

The artist transforms these objects to generate images far removed from their origin, bordering on the absurd and evoking both collage and assemblage techniques. During this creative process, the precarious becomes essential. This strategy is particularly evident in a sculpture representing a body that stumbles and falls. Here, the elements seem to crumble while maintaining their integrity, a metaphor for the fragile balance that defines the human experience.

One of the most striking pieces is a totem pole that appears to be preoccupied. Constructed from commercial shelving and ribbons, this assemblage generates an unexpected connection between the human body and inanimate objects. The work questions how our existence is trapped in the dynamics of accumulation and consumption, suggesting a parallel between the absurdity of materials and the absurd repetition of our routines. Along with the rest of the pieces, Castro's works take references from contemporary culture, from TV series to memes and stickers circulating on the internet, addressing themes such as physical pain, discomfort, and humor.

Curator Carla Barbero allows the works to unfold without any explicit dialogue with other artistic references, which strengthens the autonomy of Castro's visual and conceptual universe. Jajan't does not seek to please, but to provoke. From uncomfortable humor to the aesthetics of waste, the exhibition is an exercise in confronting our own contradictions. It is an invitation to rethink how we perceive the banal, transforming the everyday into a space for astonishment and criticism. A proposal that, far from simplifying, delves into the complexity of the human through the seemingly trivial.

This proposal invites visitors to reflect on the world's environmental crisis. Particularly in Argentina, approximately 49,300 tons of waste are generated daily. This is equivalent to about 18 million tons per year. The production of goods, wealth, and by extension of subjectivities, has an unavoidable counterpart, a forced complement: the production of waste, leftovers, and surplus. Now, as leftovers, they persist, they are transformed in the most diverse ways: as polluting agents of the environment, as elements to be recycled and reinserted in the market, as raw material for the most basic survival, or, as materials available for their poetic usufruct.

In this last instance, it is possible to inscribe Julia Padilla's approach to this category of objects. Her sensitivity is attentive to the dimension of the residual in collective life. If we bear in mind that the etymology of the term investigates refers to vestigial (trace, ruin), the keys to the research that the artist carries out on waste go back to the interior of the perspectives that they are capable of expressing, they go beyond the closure of their original and obsolete function and take advantage of the possibilities of conjugation and transformation of all kinds of materiality. By making them be seen again, by making them awaken other valences, he makes them exist in different ways and their new realities become thicker.

The Artists Union from Romania - Iași Branch and Galeria Dana present, between October 11 and November 11, the exhibition "Retroactiv" - signed by artist Ion ANGHEL. The project is curated by Smaranda Bostan and the art critic Dr. Maria Bilasevschi.

Ion Anghel is a visual artist, curator and lecturer at the Department of Painting at the University of Arts in Bucharest. A member of the UAP, within which he holds the position of President of Honor, Discipline and Arbitration Commission, Ion Anghel has been awarded with numerous prizes, being, at the same time, the author of important exhibitions held at museums and galleries throughout Romania.

"In the interstice of space-time, Ion Anghel's artistic approach within Retroactiv project does not propose a visual formula under the warmth of which understanding develops, hence the viewer's self-satisfaction, but insinuates itself into everyone's capacity for active decoding and reactive vigilance. Installation, object, sculpture, assemblage, painting, each work transcends its own personal history in the face of learned history through re-signification and contextualization. The extraordinary character of the "ordinary" that exists in found objects, saved from their own loss under the curtain of everyday indifference, outlines the often unseen substratum of the feeling you have, upon first contact, with the artist's objects, assemblages and collages.

Finding the thematic becomes secondary, in fact finding a narrative thread or an explicit statement is not justified, the viewer being invited to go beyond the immediate meaning of the fragment towards the surprise, even partial allusion. Of course, viewed without understanding the playful-ironic dimension, translated with a bittersweet feeling that remains fixed behind the retina, the intellectual-emotional resonance would be diluted towards a formalist dialogue with a enigmatic intimacy. By reassembling the elements and materials that constitute individual allegories, the creation process intuited in the final form seems similar to that of an alchemist. In fact, the re-evaluation of the object's status, which results from the artist's relationship with it, endowing it with a new destiny that erases the past and mirrors the future is, in the whole exhibition, a re-examination, an aesthetic and conceptual re-evaluation of the paradigms of art which become a metaphor for life itself. 

Precisely for this reason, disillusionment, derision, the volatility of cultural or spiritual value systems, the lessons of history, the lessons of art (the pseudo-idyllic landscape in the portrait), the lesson about human being, become through two and three dimensions a journey towards the personal archeology of artist Ion Anghel", we learn from art critic Maria Bilashevschi.