Poetic lines that don't fit in the cube

Although born in Buenos Aires, Valeria Conte Mac Donell presents herself as a Patagonian artist. Based for decades in San Martín de los Andes, her artistic practice is radically engaged with the region's landscape . Drawings in the landscape, scaled-down interventions, and performances in open spaces have shaped an output that has long embraced the immensity of the region.

It's surprising, then, how such a creative impulse has had to adapt to the Santander Foundation 's space on the ground floor of the imposing corporate building located at Paseo Colón and Brasil. It's a glass-enclosed, eminently urban space where artists such as Marta Minujín , Leandro Erlich, Nicola Costantino , Mónica Millán , and the young urban artists Elian Chali, Franco Fasoli, and Nina Kunan have already developed various exhibition projects.

In that sense, conceiving the exhibition Hilo Frío , which is on view until November, has been particularly challenging for both the artist and the curator, Jimena Ferreiro , who accompanied her on this project, which won the first edition of the Santander Foundation Visual Arts Award .

From its title, the Cold Thread project, which disperses throughout the space like various moments in a creative process, the exhibition concept suggests a seam . A sort of thread that haphazardly links this artist's career through different instances that refer to actions in different places and with different people. Is it a retrospective? One might say no. Rather, it is a way of summarizing what precedes the display of lines, shapes, and stone mounds that currently occupy the large space in a leading role. A large installation that must compete with the lyricism that has characterized each of Conte MacDonell's open-air projects, presented in video recordings. In each, the artist made enormous drawings that have had the sky and the landscape as backgrounds.

Now this is displayed in an interior that, while not entirely hostile, is not the most friendly to the grand plot of lines of exquisite lightness that the artist habitually constructs in the space.

In the winter of 2011, she wove (or drew) the walls of the house she dreamed of building on her family's land with transparent fishing line. At night, with the help of her partner, she watered each line of this provisional drawing of a home. In the cold , the water droplets transformed into icy lines that gave poetic form to her house. That project was called "Conquista de lo Uso" (Conquest of the Useless) and was one of the first to reveal the lyrical bias that drove this artist's actions.

Two winters later, she ventured to draw the interior of her house with wire. What it would look like, with furniture, stairs, various appliances, and even the stove where she could warm her hands. "The cold will pass" was the voice of hope that gave the project its title. But Valeria not only made her dream of her house a reality by drawing it in the landscape of her own family land; she also imagined herself supported by a drawing . A fantasy that became reality in "Let the sky be the background ," an action she carried out in 2015, at Lake Lolog, Villa Quilquihue, Junín de los Andes. With the sky as a background, she created a pattern that became a kind of refuge where she could let herself be sheltered in the air . In this way, she was able to realize her desire to be inside the drawing and sheltered by the drawing itself.

He used over 100 kilos of wire to create a kind of net 25 meters long and 8 meters high. In 2015, he set up something similar at the Gachi Prieto gallery. The goal was to show himself resting among doodles suspended in the air.

Valeria draws outdoors in winter and summer. She uses wire and threads of varying thicknesses and materials, and in all cases , she is physically involved . This may be because she must handle sharp tools to assemble and weave her drawings with tweezers, or because this same logic gives rise to performative actions. Many artists who express themselves through one or more disciplines tend to incorporate performance as something contingent, often a complement. In Valeria Conte Mac Donell's work , performance is essential to the production system itself and, at the same time, an inherent part of the meaning it proposes.

Thus, this artist's creativity unfolds in various directions. Beyond landscape drawing and its performative implications, her work has manifested itself as a process . What does this mean? That despite its ephemeral, impermanent nature, it undergoes changes and transformations that only occur over time. Such was the case with Conquista de lo Usoless (Conquest of the Useless) , that fantasy house made of threads, fishing lines, and drops of water that transformed into an ice-crystal dwelling overnight.

Some elements of the exhibition have been enhanced by the possibilities offered by the Foundation's extensively glassed-in space. But others, less so.

The installation, which is composed of geometric shapes scattered throughout the air, has benefited from the changing light throughout the day, casting enigmatic shadows on the floor and walls. Anchored in mounds of stones, earth, lime, and cement that evoke the collective construction technique of the royal house, these forms contrast with the rest of the projects. Their prismatic rigidity and heavy anchoring are perceived as the antithesis of the lightness of the organic lines that seem to sustain themselves in the air in the rest of the artist's work. Nevertheless, it is evident that the role of shadow, which complements and multiplies the possibilities of the drawing, is a shared principle.

From another perspective, the large glass space, visually open to the exterior, conspires against the privacy necessary for the projection of videos that capture the different stages of each project, essential to the whole. A temporary paper architecture, in the form of an open black cube, was the interesting resource conceived to overcome this difficulty. A similar material was used to present a huge panel resembling a large blackboard with reflections, notes, and sketches of the various projects and their minimal models suspended in the air like mobiles. There is something here that demonstrates the artist's passion for teaching.

Another fact that reveals the convictions that define most of her projects is the way she involves the participation of others in the creative process. Without a doubt, Mac Donell's work would not be the same without this principle. In this case, she brought together students from the CIART N5 municipal workshops in San Martín de los Andes and the Isauro Arancibia School in Buenos Aires, located right next to the Santander Foundation. The contribution of this school was fundamental to the production logistics of this large-scale project. For the artist, these types of experiences are especially important in the artistic training of new generations.