Alejandra Fenochio: Through a crack, the street sneaks into the museum

As in psychoanalysis, the session affects the patient not only during its duration, but also before and after entering the office. For Alejandra Fenochio , the same applies to painting: “Painting isn't just about painting; it's a state of constant observation; the most important thing in art is the gaze,” she says. She does so while touring her first exhibition at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes , Ahora , with Ñ .

There he painted the street and the night, its emptiness and desolation. Those who live, sleep, eat, urinate, think, and gaze at the moon there, magnetized by its radiant and reflective mystery. There are hustlers , poker stars with mischievous smiles and bright silver eyes, who, in the midst of the cold downtown, inspire complicity in the viewer, wrapped in their blankets. There are those who missed a train and their home , those who go out to collect cardboard with their children, old ladies sitting on thin mattresses next to their dogs on the sidewalks.

Alejandra chooses to paint the city at that time of day , when the light is fading, with the difficulties that this entails. She even leads a workshop in La Boca, where she sets out in a group on the hunt for that mission. The cold and the inability to see everything are difficult, but they ultimately open up new possibilities: inventing artificial perspectives that ultimately reveal more.

This series of canvases is located on the second floor of the museum. In a purposefully darkened room, in a setting that allows the light to gradually and progressively focus on the penetrating and very human gazes. They become increasingly clear, and so do their contexts, allowing us to appreciate the scenes as if they had always been there, but now take on a different clarity. The eyes are the first thing the artist does when she paints; everything else comes later and in response to them. It is impossible to escape those eyes, or to observe them with indifference; "they provoke an inevitable back and forth," curator Ana Longoni aptly states.

"Can a crack be opened in the museum to the street, allowing in not only light, but also darkness, noise, smells, uncertainty, fear, bodies, affection, solidarity, even celebration? Today, more and more people walk, work, eat (or look for something to eat), spend the night, and live on the streets , and Alejandra Fenochio knows them, many of their names and their stories, their sorrows and their laughter," the curator explains.

In his works, he contrasts the vivid color of the bodies with everything else: the buildings, the street, the sky, and the movement are all unified in a range of grays . Fenochio speaks of the "river between flesh and metal," and when he does so, almost without realizing how poetic it sounds, he points to a pair of small black and white paintings in the anteroom.

Painted in 2001, one shows a picket line where cars and guns are about to clash with bodies . The other shows a family sorting through the trash. Sometimes she fictionally places herself with her two children and her partner in these scenes, beneath the legend Holy Family. “She gets so close to those who live on the streets that she knows she can find her loved ones there,” says Longoni.

In addition to her social and community work in the La Boca neighborhood, she was a newspaper illustrator for many years, frequently encountering images of the reality that came with each article. “The lights from cars on the street at night interrupt the intimacy of those who sleep and live there,” she says. Longoni continues: “Faced with a landscape that is so mundane that it becomes invisible, indistinct, and nebulous, Fenochio's portraits shake us by invoking those uncomfortable presences, as dazzling as they are abysmal.”

Before this, some of the paintings were at the Isauro Arancibia Educational Center , for homeless people, and at maternity wards for young people. They were also on the Nicolás Avellaneda transporter bridge, which connects La Boca with Maciel Island . She hung them in July 2023, with the help of people who worked on the bridge (before they were recently laid off), before the astonished eyes of a family living down there.

She planned to leave them there for a month at most, but they remained there for almost two years. After that time , precariously hanging within reach, without acclimatization or security , they returned intact. "Perhaps she moved them to provoke an electric shock: so that those who regularly view paintings would bump into people they never see," the curator explains.

People's reactions were one of hugs and gratitude. They loved and cared for the works, and they worriedly inquired about the works when they had to be transported to the museum . After the exhibition, according to the artist and curator, it's very likely they'll stop by again.

Fenochio was born in Munro and has chosen to live in the southern part of the city for 30 years. His studio doubles as his bedroom in a tenement in La Boca, just meters from the Riachuelo . “It can take him up to a full year to finish a painting, held (never stopped) in that story that slowly takes shape,” Longoni suggests. The bodies he portrays are, as Marta Dillon described it, “genitals at rest, with no more pride than a secret that is revealed elsewhere.”

He trained at the Prilidiano Pueyrredón National School of Fine Arts and studied painting with Yuyo Noé . In the 1980s and 1990s, he participated in the Buenos Aires underground, frequenting spaces where post-dictatorship life was reinvented through art and nightlife. He painted portraits of his friends, actresses, dancers, and figures from Buenos Aires' alternative scene who sought refuge from a society still fraught with prejudice .

Later, she collaborated on the projects of León Ferrari , who was returning from exile. She was his main assistant before the term was used, although she considers herself more than anything his "devotee." She met him in the late 1980s at Yuyo Noé's workshop, where he was a student and where the famous airplane was located at the time. "It was impossible not to see León's plane and ask Yuyo what it was about. One day, he appeared at a dinner party with his typical smile, tremendous magnetism, and tremendous humor," she recalls.

“León arrived with a tremendous amount of intention behind everything he did later. His strength was impressive, as was his research and search for ways to reaffirm his understanding of the dictatorship, the evils of the world.”

In 2021, Fenochio won First Prize in Painting at the National Salon of Visual Arts . She is also a printmaker, muralist, illustrator, researcher, mother, filmmaker, forager, and cook, but above all, she identifies with portraiture.

In her paintings, you can see areas of incredible dedication, while in others she plays with a more free and relaxed stroke. When she meets her subjects, even she is nervous. "When you paint them, they can't stop looking at you," she says, but beyond everything, they are always her friends . They commit to staying there for months at a time; "they eat three meals a day at home," she says, laughing.

Also on display in the anteroom for the first time are Naipas , a collection of printed cards she created for an article on misogyny in 2016. She was caring for her father with Alzheimer's, and that format and size were what she found viable given the lack of space for her usual painting. The game redefines classic playing cards in a feminist way, with female figures on the cards whose poses, gestures, and colors emphasize joy and play. They replace the warlike and medieval language of swords, clubs, and "envido" with symbols like "la jamone."

A wink as lovely as it is necessary for times new and sadly aligned with the manifesto once proposed by Simone de Beauvoir : "A political, economic or religious crisis will be enough for women's rights to be questioned again; these rights are never taken for granted."