Stepping into “Curada de espanto” (Cured of Fright) at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Buenos Aires (MACBA) feels less like entering a museum gallery and more like eavesdropping on a secret ceremony long after the participants have fled. In her debut solo museum exhibition, Porteña painter Ornella Pocetti offers a seductive, unsettling dive into a world ruled by suspicion, uncanny femininity, and psychological tension.

Ornella Pocetti at MACBA

The exhibition’s title—a colloquial Argentine phrase translating roughly to "cured of fright" or hardened against fear—carries an immediate irony. Pocetti’s canvases do not celebrate immunity to horror; rather, they dissect the scars left behind by trauma and desire. Her figures, mostly women rendered with lush, velvety brushwork, exist in a realm of perpetual limbo. Turned away from the viewer or half-submerged in eerie, twilight landscapes, they seem caught between waiting for an impending catastrophe and reckoning with one that has already transpired.

Pocetti’s technical dexterity shines in how she handles surface and light. High heels, bare skin, serpentine shapes, and heavy iron framing elements coexist within compositions that borrow as much from 19th-century Symbolism and Latin American magical realism as they do from contemporary cinematic framing. Her palettes—deep, bruised purples, sickly greens, and flashes of hyper-saturated hues—create an oppressive intimacy that draws you in while warning you to stay back. The lingering presence of the snake, appearing across several works as both an omen of betrayal and a symbol of shed skin, acts as a master key to the show's underlying motif: transformation through exposure to the strange.