Sonia Basch: Friends and people I do not know
Matienschön, 2015. Curators: Luz Peuscovich and Agustín Jais.
«Friends and people I do not know» is an exhibition of portraits. Digital drawings, a mural and a «delegated performance» explore with compulsion faces, looks and gestures that, like all forms built from love, move and look to, ultimately, promise to touch.
The key in Sonia Basch’s first solo exhibition is the exchange of gestures: that of the portrayed person, that of the line, that of recognition. Because the words «friends» and «strangers» in the title, rather than two different series, announce differences of degree. Sharpness and details are intensified in those with whom the act of portraiture is constructed as a mutual gift. Instead, the luxury of deformity and pictorial exploration grows with distance, like a relay race as virtual as physical between the original scene and the digital impression. Bukowski or some unknown old women are are for Sonia guinea pigs in her neurotic search for beauty, which goes back and forth from painting to digital image.
This exhibition is just a moment in the process of a continuous and unfinished work, such as her urgent and changing drawings, of which she accumulates hundreds, each one in dozens of versions. Here she exhibits just (?) 25, while her blogs continue to reflect her prolific activity. The curatorial proposal reflects this transforming excess: together with the digital prints, a roll of paper will unfold and become drawn as the days go by, like a sculpture of time (or a butterfly net: as if the work existed a priori, Sonia drawing on air). That is why there is also a huge mural of her friend Lu Deca, who in turn will be hired as the gallery guard/guide during the exhibition. Or, finally, the «activations», performance events and intersections with other disciplines within the framework of the exhibition, which are a mark of Matienschön’s proposal.
