Mercosul Biennial Catalogue
Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brasil
By Victoria Noorthoorn
Chief Curator of the 7 Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brasil
The fantastic, rather than the comic, is the register under which Nina Lola Bachhuber’s drawings of monochromatic figures (whether in blue or red ink) are transformed. In this exhibition, there are four very different such series in order to evidence the breath of her interests. Her figures-who seem to mock the interface between abstraction and figuration-come to us as true mutations of beings, regardless of their nature (some are biomorphic-gothic, others geometric-with a certain air of the figurines used in constructivist theater-, and still others, as in the case of her calaveras (skulls), are mythical and surreal).
In each series, the transformation that takes place from one drawing to the next seems to delineate a language in which each drawing entails a syntax and grammar all its own where the almost scientific rigor and precision contrasts with the freedom of the artist’s formulations. This freedom, in turn, reflects a particular organicity and logic, where the combinations of elements convey the artist’s imaginary world. In the end, the viewer is left with uncertainty on the mysterious nature of these figures and their reason for being. They seem to have a life all their own; they might mock us and our taxative knowledge and classifications, to propose instead a parallel cosmology of beings who go through life in a dreamlike state and who perhaps, as Oscar Wilde would say, are not real but rather evidence of what lie our reality is.
Victoria Noorthoorn is an independent curator based in Buenos Aires, Argentina
and the Chief Curator of the 7 Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brasil
