Last updated on February 26, 2024
Cultures in Friction (2017-), by Vero Murphy (Argentina, 1973-), marks the artist’s discovery within her own body of work of an abstract language as subjective as it is loaded with a collective memory linked to human geography and to the cultural landscape of Latin America. Instead of acrylics and oil paint, Murphy paints her works using natural materials like gold and yerba mate. She extends them on the canvas as signs of historical tensions, proposing an aesthetic-poetic path that goes from the animosity between cultures long set in opposition to one another, to the search for dialogical spaces. By exploring the physical and symbolic specters of materials of both vegetable and mineral origin, Murphy is able to establish vast meeting spaces in her vestige-laden paintings. Yerba mate and gold function in her work certainly as the units of a language that drags signs of contradiction in each material that generates fluids, and that stains the realm of her canvases like currents that sweep over abyssal cultural distances, but which in the end converge in each of her pieces. (By Adriana Herrera Téllez)
