Florencia Böhtlingk at Malba Puertos: Painting with the Vibration of Immediacy

With a unique style that combines geometry and gesture with multiple pictorial traditions, the artist exhibits works from the last 15 years in her first retrospective exhibition.

At Malba's Puertos venue in Escobar.

Seated outdoors, Florencia Böhtlingk makes watercolor sketches, one after another. She can create up to thirty. “Sur le motif,” the artist says. This pictorial practice, immersed in nature and developed in Europe towards the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, granted autonomy to the sketch and renewed prestige to the landscape. It is the starting point of the artist's creative process. Later, in her studio, she develops the final work based on these preparatory sketches. She also paints portraits in oil, that other great pictorial genre where the subject is depicted in front of the canvas.

But in her work, these traditional forms seem to function as elements she selects from the vast toolbox that is the history of painting to create a contemporary and singular production. At once figurative and abstract, rational and sensitive, interior and exterior, chromatic and linear. And committed to her time and social space. The more than eighty works in the Malba Puertos gallery make this evident, showcasing the artist's trajectory over the last fifteen years in a well-deserved first institutional exhibition with the precise curatorial vision of Alejandra Aguado.

I swear all this happened in a day. The title reveals a playful and literary imagination. “An adventure in which approaching reality can be, in the artist's words, pure fantasy,” Aguado notes in the exhibition text. Fantasy anchors itself in a reality. In this case, the reality of the urgency to paint. “I think a lot about what painting is for me. I decided it's a passion. Behind that comes the whole connection with the craft, my colleagues, and my own work,” she told Ñ.

The Río de la Plata and Misiones. Two privileged landscapes featured in her paintings. In the first case, her gaze falls on the islands of the Delta and the Ribera Norte Natural Park in the San Isidro district, with its reeds, herons, ceibo trees, and floods. And on the interior of her home studio. In the second, on the rural and jungle geography of La Bonita in the La Flor Colony. “Being in front of the subject always gives me an adrenaline rush, a leap of faith, and, on the other hand, a sense of commitment. You have to keep going no matter what,” the artist tells me, in a statement that also reveals a certain struggle and willpower. European and Latin American modernity is glimpsed, recalling at times the Brazilian Tarsila do Amaral, the Uruguayan Joaquín Torres García, the French Henri Matisse, naive art, the muralism of the 1960s, among other artists and movements. A genealogy that plays with the profusion of color, lines, and compositional decisions: frontality, hierarchical perspective, and geometrization.

Communities and Writing

Böhtlingk mentions the Uruguayan painter Carlos Giambiagi, who in the second decade of the last century settled in the Misiones rainforest following the writer Horacio Quiroga. In the work "Villanueva in the Workshop" (2014), the names "Preloran, Giambiagi, Chucalezna" appear, a trilogy of names linked to painting, landscape, art education, and ethnography. Because what is portrayed is a collective experience ("Community Skewer at School," "Sunset in the Guarani Village," both from 2016). In this way, he establishes dialogues and community with the peers with whom he goes out to paint, with the areas visited and portrayed, and with intellectual and artistic references.

Writing permeates several works, eventually taking center stage in "Words Are Images" (2010) and "The Campaign" (2019). "Words sometimes function as anchors for the abstract nature of a landscape," the artist tells me. From the landscape of a social demonstration, she retains only what has been said, heard, and written, achieving another image of a social fabric. Like a cloud of words, but without hierarchical relationships. "Using typography linked to crafts, street art, and spontaneous signage, the works capture a reality where vital and antagonistic forces coexist. Variegated and vibrant (...) the words express the current state of the territory and the equivalence that exists in Böhtlingk's work between painting and naming," Aguado writes. The word as pictorial performance, I think.

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