Ornella Pocetti

            Ornella Pocetti, although part of the Viento Dorado collective of artists, is also part of a generation of young Argentine painters who, without forming a school, have coincided in updating the intensity that the Gothic tradition and surrealist painting still preserve today. Trained in the Visual Arts degree program at the National University of the Arts and in various workshops and teaching programs, much of her imagery comes from both the digital circulation of the great classics of painting and a certain unconsciousness of contemporary visual culture.

            Already in her first exhibition, "Defying Time," at the Acéfala gallery, the series of paintings and ceramics displayed suggested a universe in which the female body is simultaneously placed at the center but covered, embedded in an apparently natural landscape but subjected to the artificial action of being covered. This logic between absence and presence, between natural and artificial, is deployed in the two genres she usually works with: landscape and portraiture. In them, the environments and subjects portrayed acquire the malleable density of the dreamlike. Bodies without faces, creatures in metamorphosis, vegetation turned mist.

            With the series exhibited in the show "Our Weapons," the painter draws on the tradition of ornamental painting and small scale. While starting from "Glass Tests," a series of hanging pieces in which the weight of the work transforms the images of the painted bodies, Pocetti begins to experiment with display devices, always attentive to the distorting and fragmentary effect they infuse into the female figure.