IF DAWN BREAKS, WE LEAVE

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EMILIA HENDREICH, RENATA JUNCADELLA. CATALINA OZ

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The golden age. And all the girls. Anthropophagic Manifesto, Oswald de Andrade, 1928.

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A girl poses in front of the mirror. Her house is a castle, with hidden rooms and enormous windows. A spiral staircase and an immense basement. She parts her hair into two exact halves and patiently braids it into two very long plaits. She is being watched, but she hasn't noticed yet.

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What other beings inhabit there? What mysteries hide within the walls? Like in the drowsiness before a nightmare, you just have to turn off the light for them to emerge from their hiding places. Beauty is fragile and deceptive. The end of the braid is, in truth, the head of a snake. Three eyes, unblinking, stare back.

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There are many ways to construct a self-portrait. To quote and be quoted. To appropriate a mythology and feed it, to the point of exacerbating the obvious and revealing its mystery. Time stops and the phantasmagorical is inevitable. Painting is a reminder of absence and also a confirmation that the spaces we think we remember inevitably merge with imagination.

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We are in the presence of three artists who operate as collectors. Each with her own cabinet of curiosities—rooms filled with wonders that reflect their whims. Obsessive and meticulous, they create a rhapsody of daydreams that wink repeatedly at Art History. Thus, their golden frames and fine porcelain sheets portray other eras and styles from a distant, but not so distant, past.

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Emilia, Renata, and Catalina skillfully adorn, and like in a handwritten letter, each of their distinct styles appears, leaving a mark on their stories. Delicacy appears in the meticulous gesture of each detail and makes the works even more personal. The three artists advance with light steps, silently gliding along the castle walls. The moonlight bathes their bodies from head to toe. The girl who posed in front of the mirror doesn't know it yet, but when dawn breaks, they will have already passed through.

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Carolina Repetto and Francisca Ranieri