Fernanda Laguna

Orgullo y Prejuicio

Art in Argentina in the 90s and Beyond
Chapter III

This third chapter of Orgullo y Prejuicio. Art in Argentina in the 90s and Beyond —a series of seven online exhibitions produced by the gallery and curated by art historian Francisco Lemus— is devoted to Fernanda Laguna (1972). She is considered one of Argentina’s most influential contemporary artists due to her unique vision and her multifaceted art practice which centers on visual art, but includes celebrated poetry and novels, creation of numerous alternative endeavours and cultural spaces and an effective social practice which she has carried on for over seventeen years in the marginalized neighborhood of La Lonja, Villa Fiorito, where her art workshops and projects have changed the lives of local children and women, leading to the creation of a center for feminist activism in the midst of an environment where gender violence is endemic.

Laguna had her first solo exhibition at Centro Cultural Rojas in 1994, followed by another one in 1995. Images from both shows are included in this chapter. In 2000 she co-founded Belleza y Felicidad (Beauty and Happiness) an artist-run art gallery and publishing project which was a watershed moment in the development of art in Argentina, establishing certain ethics and aesthetics which are still an active inspiration for younger artists today. In 2003 she opened a branch of Belleza y Felicidad in Barrio La Lonja, Villa Fiorito. Works from those years and more recent paintings are featured as well, in order to show a panoramic view of the development of her work throughout the years. We have included information on Belleza y Felicidad and a separate page on ByF Fiorito, additional layers rich in information can be accessed by clicking on images and documents.

The release of this chapter focused on Laguna coincides with her anthological exhibition at Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU, in Richmond, VA, curated by Dominic Willsdon and the publication of a book on her paintings from the 90s entitled Amor Total, los 90 y el camino del corazón (Total Love and the Way of the Heart), published by Editorial Ivan Rosado, Rosario, Argentina.

ORGULLO Y PREJUICIO
Art in Argentina in the 90 and beyond.

Chapter I. Introduction.
Chapter II. Teen Conceptualism / Didactic Conceptualism
Chapter III. Fernanda Laguna

Alberto Goldenstein, Retrato de Fernanda Laguna, serie Retratos del mundo del arte, 2007

Alberto Goldenstein, Fernanda Laguna, 2007.

FERNANDA LAGUNA: A RADICAL LEGACY.
By Francisco Lemus

A lot has been written about Fernanda Laguna and her art. Both have been categorized as naive or as deploying an underhanded strategy, but there is no ruse in her relationship to art. What constitutes art is right there in plain sight: childhood, what happened and what we make up, objects, copies with no original, poorness, and affirmations. Fernanda is like the total artist, though she wriggles out of that category as well. She is at once an artists’ artist, an artist for connoisseurs, and an artist of the people. She is known in the art community and in the feminist community, but her influence exceeds them both; neither is her only home.

Small mythical figures of the art world in Buenos Aires, the artists of the nineties declared themselves aristocrats of their own taste. Those artists had nothing; they made a lot with very little. But their subjectivity was front and center. Grand themes valorized for their heroic and testimonial quality were displaced by a morality of minorities that had rarely been so central to the local art world up to that moment. Aesthetics and politics intersected in the exercise of difference; artists focused on the relationship with what was closest at hand. They were excited by materials, processes, an idea of beauty, and the daily experiences of friendship.

In a neoliberal context hostile to bodies, that was the most radical stance possible. Jorge Gumier Maier, curator of the Centro Cultural Rojas gallery, gave words and visibility to an attitude that has persisted in Argentine art. The specific sensibility that characterized the poor and utopia-less Buenos Aires of those years seems to have been absorbed by today’s young artists. Fernanda Laguna did a great deal with the Rojas gallery legacy: she expanded it, took it out of its comfort zone, combined its characters and premises.

By 1994, the gallery was somewhat staid; Gumier Maier had developed a kind of model based on what he had done during the gallery’s first five years. But Fernanda’s exhibition that year upped the stakes, taking the Rojas brand into shakier ground, almost back to square one. Access to Fernanda’s universe of fantasies is unlimited. She speaks a language well outside the hermeticism of contemporary art; she is somewhere else, somewhere less expensive where unnecessary expenditures are eschewed. Paradoxically, Fernanda’s irruption on the Buenos Aires scene was vital to contemporary art. Her shows occasioned love as well as repudiation.

Niña con perrito, 1994.

Buena chica, 1994.

Cristian Castro, 1994.

Luis Miguel, 1994.

Fernanda Laguna, La chica más linda del mundo, 1994, acrílico sobre tela, 16 x 11 cm

La chica más linda del mundo, 1994.

View the show Pinturas y Objetos at the Centro Cultural Rojas, 1994

Afiche de la exposición Fernanda Laguna. Pintura y objetos, Galería de Artes Visuales del Centro Cultural Rojas 1994

Poster for the exhibition Fernanda Laguna. Pinturas y objetos, 1994.

In his texts, Gumier Maier articulated different ideas about the state of art and curating. When he wrote about Fernanda, though, his identification was absolute—something that had only happened before with Marcelo Pombo and Omar Schiliro. In those artists, he found not only aesthetic guile, elusive of any conceptual speculation, but also the faculty, the looseness, to settle somewhere where, apparently, they did not belong. The Rosa Asplanato Academy, a neighborhood painting studio peopled by women and dreams, is one of the imaginary points of reference that Gumier Maier uses to signal what he shares with them, an unspoken alliance that seems to have guided Fernanda’s career as well, even into the 2000s. That academy might be one of the images most representative of the nineties insofar as this group of persons had the audacity to connect anything to “the art of the twentieth century.” Fernanda and other Rojas artists—especially the most eccentric of them—had to explain the reason for their works to a solemn audience, dodging countless judgments based on the sexist and backward criterion of quality.

Tapa del catálogo de la exposición Fernanda Laguna, Galería de Artes Visuales del Centro Cultural Rojas, 1995.

Cover from Fernanda Laguna, 1995 exhibition catalog

Rayos dobles, 1995.

Mi mejor amiga extraterrestre, 1995.

Flores, 1994.

3. Fernanda Laguna, Mujer araña, 1995, acrílico sobre tela, 30 x 60 cm

Mujer araña, 1995.

4. Fernanda Laguna, Rayos pequeño, 1995, acrílico sobre tela, 21 x 22 cm

Rayos pequeño, 1995.

View the exhibition Fernanda Laguna at the Centro Cultural Rojas, 1995

A lot is at stake in Fernanda’s exhibitions. I would venture to say that they exist in the mind, something about her hunches makes them endearing. As a fetishist of the past, I would have loved to have been at her first show in 1994. In that noisy hallway that was the Rojas gallery, art made itself felt like a cloak that embraces us all. The operation was very modest. It neither imposed a sense of distance nor endless metaphors: what you saw is what you got. Fernanda’s show was publicized with a fuchsia poster that had an image of Little Red Riding Hood on it. She and Gumier Maier left a good deal of space between the paintings on the wall; they placed on white pedestals an array of stuffed animals and a little wooden house that was also a lamp—an animist archive where objects are alive and have names and altars (they can even be a girl friend to chat with).

For the record, the show was not a replica of a teenager’s bedroom. The curatorial vision was sparse due, at least in part, to the few resources available. In shows at Rojas, the domestic was tied to an irreverent attitude toward art, it was not about replicting a home’s decorative scheme. In her exhibition the following year, Fernanda included figurines, striped paintings that have the same color spectrum as eyeshadow, and some seemingly-unfinished landscapes. Abstraction and genres like the landscape are not the exclusive terrain of art, and painting is not a discipline that can be separated from ordinary life. Fernanda’s approach to things is not erudite. The works in that second show at Rojas included Mi mejor amiga extraterrestre (My Best Alien Friend),a fictitious character that straddles costumbrismo and surrealism who appears in a number of paintings. Sociability is central to images and stories peopled with friends, lovers, and second selves.

Poesías, 1995.

Download book

Chica con teléfono, 1995.

Motoquera, 1995.

Belgrano, 1994.

Chica en la playa,1995.

La chica con el pez y la oruga junto al río, 1995.

Chica con bolso, 1994.

Belleza y Felicidad

Fernanda Laguna, 2007 - Fotografía: Sebastián Freire

Fernanda Laguna, 2008. Photo: Sebastián Freire.

“ Aesthetics and politics intersected in the exercise of difference; artists focused on the relationship with what was closest at hand. They were excited by materials, processes, an idea of beauty, and the daily experiences of friendship.”

Libres, 2001.

Belleza exótica, 1999.

Divina casémonos hoy!, 2000.

I love, 2000.

Hacia tí voy, 1999.

Destino, 2001.

Eeee, 2000.

¡Quemada!, 2001.

Fan, 2001.

In 1999, Fernanda and writer Cecilia Pavón opened Belleza y Felicidad—an institution of their own, housed in an old glassworks storefront in the Almagro neighborhood of Buenos Aires. Belleza y Felicidad was a literary breeding ground, but the idea of art that circulated there was initially formulated at the Rojas gallery and in the wee hours at Sergio De Loof’s discotheques. Years later, in 2003, Fernanda created a community center, also called Belleza y Felicidad, in Villa Fiorito in Lomas de Zamora county. It initially functioned as an art gallery and art school, but now combines feminist activism through Ni Una Menos Fiorito and a gourmet soup kitchen. At play in all of these experiences is a precise image in which Fernanda deposits the artistic legacy of the nineties.

The white shopping bags that held the trinkets and slim books sold at Belleza y Felicidad were decorated with phrases and cartoon hearts. Honed and removed from the walls of “The Rojas”, images of this sort resumed their original course. Fiorito’s precarious homes have housed shows where art is sacred and decorative—just as Gumier Maier would have wanted. The protest signs that, joining scraps, they put together for demonstrations voice political demands that until not long ago were written off as frivolous or secondary in verticalist agendas. <br
Encounters were held and projects devised in other spaces conceived by Fernanda (Tu rito, Agatha Costure, and—more recently—El Universo, though I suspect I am forgetting a few since Fernanda’s ability to generate events defies any possible listing). Though made with little, they always prove enduring. While she externalizes her emotions on any surface, words and things seem to be the firmest of them, a center of operations that enables her to experiment in other aspects of her life.

Belleza y Felicidad, 2007.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Belleza y Felicidad, 2007 / Fernanda Laguna, Jorge Gumier Maier, Mariela Scafati and Daniel Joglar. Photos: Alberto Goldenstein / Librería artística, 2007 / Works by Leonel Pinola and Adrián Villar Rojas, 2007 / Marian De Caro, La belleza es de los artistas cuando la felicidad es compartida, november 2007 / Belleza y Felicidad flyers, 2001.

Belleza y Felicidad, año 1, nº 3, diciembre de 1999_

Belleza y Felicidad, año 2, nº 5, marzo de 2000_

021. Belleza y Felicidad, año 3, nº 23, noviembre de 2001_

07. Belleza y Felicidad, año 2, nº 7, mayo de 2000_

Magazines and books published by Belleza y Felicidad Ediciones, founded by Cecilia Pavón and Fernanda Laguna.

Belleza y felicidad Fiorito

Mural de Javier Barilaro, Barrio La lonja , Villa Fiorito, 2015

Mural by Javier Barilaro, neighborhood La Lonja, Villa Fiorito, Buenos Aires, 2015.

Map of the neighborhood.

Arts, performance and poetry workshops by Marie Gouric, 2014.

In 2003 Fernanda met Isolina Silva, who run a soup kitchen in her community, La Lonja, Villa Fiorito, along with another neighbor, Marta Ramos. Fernanda became involved in helping by fundraising and working in the production of the meals. Soon after, she opened a branch of her art space Belleza y Felicidad in a room in Isolina’s home. This is how Belleza y Felicidad Fiorito got started, initially as a series of art classes for the local children and as an exhibition space where well-established artists showed along members of the community. Over its 17 years of existence Belleza y Felicidad Fiorito developed into a true resource for the neighbors to acquire tools for survival, working as a collective in collaboration with artists.

View more about Belleza y felicidad Fiorito

¡Qué triste estoy!, 2018.

Fernanda always knew she had something powerful in her hands and that, to materialize it, there was no need to dwell on formal aspects, let alone technique. She once told me that early on she wanted to be a conceptual artist. She was obsessed with fetuses and had planned an installation that was impossible to make. So she decided to spend that energy decorating her portfolio; she saw it as a chance to show off her handicrafts. Indeed, handicrafts were a recurring theme in art from the nineties, but with some caveats that are often overlooked. For artists from the nineties, handicrafts knew no age, class, or gender or, at least, those categories were shelved: anyone at any time in their life can make arts and crafts. Handicrafts do not aspire to anthropological perfection like craftsmanship, or to uniqueness and irrepeatability like works of art. Their contents can be tender or violent without bothering anybody.

Fernanda’s work began with small painted copies of existing images on stretched canvases and sheets of paper with glitter, but afterwards snails and monkeys hanging from a vine appeared. Things that, even today, are hard to place. These are uncomfortable pieces; some of them need to be opened with your hand, and they get dirty in the process. Could anything be queerer than that devotion? I doubt it. I even ask how much of that devotion is entwined in art and poetry in its freest and most radical sense. That is the road of the heart, el camino del corazón.

Fernanda Laguna, Sin título, 2017, acrílico sobre tela y collage, 33 x 26 cm

Untitled, 2017.

¿A qué hora venís?, 2018.

Un momento difícil, 2017.

Retrato de chica con moños o mariposas, 2019.

Mi yo escondido II, 2017.

Fernanda Laguna, Sin título, 2018, acrílico sobre tela calada, 58 x 48 cm.

Untitled, 2018.

Chica con caracol, 2019.

Fernanda Laguna - Las mañanas 3 - Acrílico sobre tela calada, moños, strass plástico, cadenas, dijes y mimbre - 70 x 60 cm - 2014

Las mañanas 3, 2014.

Regalo, 2017.

Mi diario

Fernanda Laguna, Mi diario (My Diary), 2017, artist book, 19,30 x 50 cm (open).

BIO

FERNANDA LAGUNA, b. Hurlingham, Province of Buenos Aires , 1972.

Lives and works in Buenos Aires. She is considered one of the most important and influential Argentine artists of her generation. Her multifaceted practice centers on the visual arts, but encompasses as well celebrated poetry and novels, the creation of alternative cultural spaces and projects, social practice, and feminist activism. Her first solo exhibitions were held at the Centro Cultural Rojas in 1994 and 1995. In 2001, she co-founded Belleza y Felicidad, an exhibition and meeting space that marked a milestone in the development of art in Buenos Aires during the early 2000s. In this context, she organized more than two hundred art exhibitions and a low-cost publishing house. Afterwards she moved Belleza y Felicidad to Villa Fiorito, where for more than a decade she has been developing an art program for children and a center for feminist activism through artistic projects. In the last recent decade she created and managed a series of independent art spaces: Tu Rito, Agatha Costure, El Universo, and others. She has published nine books, the next one will come out under the Random House publishing label. Recent solo and group shows include Fernanda Laguna: As Everybody (Como Todo el Mundo), Institute of Contemporary Art, Virgina Commonwealth University (2020); A Universal History of Infamy, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2017); Site Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA; and Take me, I’m Yours, Villa Medici, Rome. In February 2022, a solo exhibition of her works on paper will be held at the Drawing Center, New York. Her work is in the collections of Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Centro de Arte Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid (thanks to a donation from Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, New York); CA2M, Madrid; the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires; the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (MALBA); the Rufino Tamayo Museum, Mexico City; Jorge Perez collection, Miami and many private collections.

Francisco Lemus holds a bachelor’s degree in art history from the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, and a master’s in curatorial studies and a doctorate in comparative art theory from the Universidad Nacional Tres de Febrero. His dissertation was entitled Guarangos y soñadores. La Galería del Rojas en los años noventa (Vulgarians and Dreamers: The Rojas Gallery in the Nineties). Thanks to a post-doctoral fellowship awarded by the CONICET, Lemus is doing research on the political and artistic responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis in Argentina during the post-dictatorship period. He is a professor in the History and Social Studies division of the Art Department at the Universidad de La Plata and in the Graduate Program in Gender Studies at Universidad Tres de Febrero. He has published articles in academic journals and non-specialized magazines in Argentina and abroad. The exhibitions he has curated include Imágenes seropositivas. Prácticas artísticas en torno al vih durante los años 90 (La Ene, 2017), Tácticas luminosas. Artistas mujeres en torno a la Galería del Rojas (Colección Fortabat, 2019) and y Fuera de serie. Alejandra Seeber/Leda Catunda (Paralelo 1||3, MALBA, 2021).

We thank Jorge Gumier Maier,Gustavo Bruzzone, Ana Wandzik and Maximiliano Masuelli from Editorial Ivan Rosado, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Colección Eduardo F. Costantini and Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. We also thank the photographers that registered the activities in Belleza y Felicidad y Belleza and felicidad Fiorito.