Magalí Milkis works the pictorial from the body, matter and space. Her work is a collection of stimuli poured onto the canvas as a reflection of chance. Sometimes, even, she juxtaposes papers in which he has taken some note to retain, generating a mixture that leaves nothing out: the memorial aspect continues to be completed and the traces warn of its process. The brushstrokes indicate that the body passed throug. What remains are minimal scenes that treasure the fragments of a life from the register of the pictorial –memory and raw domesticity.
Since The truthfulness of the egg is not credible, the mono-figure that appeared in Magalí's works as an obsessive element, let's call it "the thing", is radicalized in a deliberate gestural painting in which specific figurations are integrated that account for a relational narrative. The act of returning to "the thing" now appears to-the-memory that figures in the anecdotal. “The thing”, which for years resisted multiple literal references (egg, face, mask, uterus), is the synthetic unit of an organism that has unfolded.
Magalí's paintings take place after a bodily practice that alleviates the state of consciousness, beginning each work as a new update of the mind – or a new dream state? Each canvas is an open hieroglyph like the cut in the earth where magma emerges. She orders and pays homage to her scenes in the manner of a prehistoric cult: the little bug she inadvertently killed, her dad's poker table, the goblet: little cavities of innocent intimacy, treasures that take root without warning, as if They just show up. The container edges nest the figurations, making it possible to cultivate the relationships that rest there. The operation resonates with the universal dynamic: isolate a minor system from something global, transmute the elements as alchemical acts.
The expressionist brushstrokes emphasize a work on color that appeals to radical atmospheric and emotional elements, not as the background of relational diagrams, but as the integral rewriting guided by the stimulation of the deliberate mind when, for a moment, it captures something that it does not remember. how it originated, but that is present there, perpetuating itself in a new configuration. Real and fantasy begin to blur. The figure-ground binomial is diluted assuming an immersive three-dimensionality and the works seem to propose “entering a place”.
It has passed through the body, it has filtered through the mind to come out from the hand, to then return to the center and lie down on itself. What thing? To reflect is, in truth, to reflect on oneself. The cosmic circularity makes germ in the works of Magalí. The silence too. As if living from memory wasn't building a timeless present.

From abstraction to a series of flowers, Natalia Lo Bello's oil paintings (1976) display an additive process that combines color and technique. Through a common element similar to a petal, a triangle, a fractal, his paintings give shape to fronds, blooms and skies in the manner of a mechanized impressionism, in which the brushstroke (pixelated) subordinates its luminous effect to the whole.

Empty airports, metropolitan museums and skyscrapers are the figurative platforms on which the expressive search of Luciana Levinton (1977) is based. A rarefied palette of ghostly pinks, purple planes and gray segments is electrified by fluorescent lines and strokes. Temporal and thermal at the same time, his work treats interiors as panoramas, facades as sketches, proportions as landscapes, and creates the illusion of a scenic eye.

Ten gigantic canvases conceived from a minuscule motif -variations of a form (an inverted drop, a featureless face, a neck, a balloon?) on a plane- serve Magalí Milkis (1978) to perhaps configure the experience strangest of the sample. Those aligned, two-tone figures that alternate between opacity and brightness, isolated, mute like UFOs, what do they mean? In some, the empty portrait of a skull has more layers of matter; in others, the background makes the deliberate imperfection a plastic virtue: it is the spectators who, before the mirror of the shadow, complete the work.

Related by a certain sympathy for disfigurement, the oil paintings by María Ferrari Hardoy (1976) reflect on the records of the past. Based on photographs from newspapers and magazines that represent prosaic scenes (men conversing on a set in front of a camera; a man with his legs crossed; a man in a theater with his double? Only men embody the almost epistemic fables of the artist), the work of painting invests with drama the figures that break down into unreal backgrounds, so that the gaze discovers there is a field of forces beneath the support, a philosophical theater of the destiny of the images.

She is the point.
She is the form.
She is the plan.
She is so tall.

Richard Coleman

It is an egg!
For me it is a nail.
It's a petal, don't you see?

I heard these and other forms said yesterday at the private exhibition of Magalí Milkis, to which I had the honor of being invited in a huge space in this capital. I didn't quite understand why people bothered to give a name to that form they looked at, which was impossible not to look at, given that his paintings measure almost three meters high by almost two meters wide. Yes, they sound impressive, like a museum colleague said, but more impressive is the synthesis that Magalí achieved with that shape and color, in which everyone fights to baptize her with a name.

I couldn't speak, I could only say hello and enjoy my glass of wine while Magalí showed me, between nervous and happy, her “children” in oil. What could I say in the face of so much security (although she still doesn't realize it) plastic, and work carried out with such impetus that it even made me envious, and at the same time I thought, it's good that someone so young investigates so much, and doesn't worry about the marketing or how their prices will be in the market.

My mind forced me to decipher the shape, that shape as strong as a spiral or mandala, and even as disturbing as a labyrinth seen from above. Little by little my mind loosened up and I enjoyed the color that Magalí calculated before putting on each canvas, the combination of tones that she knew well was not easy because she told me about it.

Then I thought, and I even think I dare to decipher that that form is her, not Magalí, but "she", a woman, the woman who waits for me to just look at her, understand her, whom I draw little by little the face with the look. Eyebrows, eyes, nose and finished on her lips as a final touch.
But after discovering "her", I wonder who "she" is, if one day she will speak to me, if perhaps I run into her in a room to dance to the rhythm of any song, or by chance ask me for the time on the street or Tell me that we can only be friends.

I resign myself, I leave my empty glass and while I walk through the streets of Núñez in search of a taxi, I admit that it is only a mute form in a large canvas that Magalí knew how to put with precision and great confidence.

August 2010