With the dirt, the artist Lihuel González created a poem. Actually, she took photos. And then, a great installation. For a long time, she set her sights to find in a handful of discarded objects – and some even rotten ones – a reason to create works of art. She made use of that superpower that only artists have: turning anything into art. Where someone sees trash, this Lihuel finds a precious stone, the pearl of her deceased grandmother that is kept like a treasure on the nightstand. Perhaps being an artist has more to do with this than with earning dollars, with being able to go through life making alchemical passes. The stage where the tricks appear is The utilities, his current exhibition at the Gachi Prieto gallery. In this space, different photographs of objects collected on the street are gathered, which are displayed on supports also created with discards: the photos are not inside a frame, but are placed on remains of furniture, pieces of pipe beds and glass. broken. They are subtle images embedded in sordid structures. A drop of love on other people’s dirt.
The works presented in this exhibition arise from work that Lihuel has been carrying out for two years. Furthermore, it works as a continuation of The beginning and the end of things, a work that he presented in France, in 2023, and that arose from the observation and intervention of objects that he found wandering the streets of Paris. That drift that began on the other side of the ocean moved to Buenos Aires and functioned as a kickstart for this exhibition in Gachi Prieto.
Throughout his career, González used different formats to create his works. Photographs, videos and even forays into the world of theater. She has mixed them up and even abandoned them. This artist adjusts the format to the work she is producing. It is never clear if it is she who decides or if it is her own works that tell her how this or that thing should be. Perhaps, the ideas she has about her work function as little dictators that tell her how they want to see themselves.
Since he began exhibiting his work, more than ten years ago, Lihuel has been developing very diverse ways of producing. The utilities It seems to be a synthesis of many of his previous projects: it is an exhibition that allowed this artist to return to photography, but to exhibit it in a way more in line with his most recent works – more linked to installation. However, beyond the formats, she always sets her eyes on details and discarded things, for example: in 2016 she made a video in which she recorded an entire walk in Mexico City in which she carried a pine tree – logically found on the street –, following directions from the inhabitants of that city, to some forests.
Lihuel looks into those nooks and crannies that most people would rather not look at. Perhaps that is why the portraits that appeared in Their houses, one of his first works, showed homes that, when captured by González, were a bit disturbing. Maybe there was nothing wrong with those houses, but the bias that this artist’s eyes have transformed those spaces into disturbing places, to say the least. That same tension is in the photos that she collects The utilities. They have an aura of mystery that does not generate any calm. They are a warning: things are not as calm as they seem.
ADRIFT
Apparently, Lihuel González always had the habit of collecting very diverse things. At one point in his life he wanted to gather bird wings. The remains of the animals came to this artist, she dissected them and kept them. Let’s say that Lihuel is an artist and at the same time a collector. The objects that she decided to collect for The utilities They were not extracted from any animal or other living being, but they are also elements that in advance could be thought of as waste – which is an elegant way of saying garbage.
Each of the pieces seen in this exhibition were created with elements that appeared on the street: from the objects that the photos portray, to the structures that contain them. The methodology to find them was simply to go for a walk and make sure the objects were small, or light enough, to be carried in the pockets of a coat or in a backpack. First he did it through the streets of Paris and then through those of Buenos Aires. As Carla Barbero, curator of the exhibition, points out in the text that accompanies the exhibition: “Walking without a destination, a legacy of the Situationists in the ’60s.”
These drifts that Lihuel made allowed him to reconvert those elements that were in the corners, he extended the life of a handful of objects that for many people no longer had any type of purpose or use. In the discarding of others, González found a new opportunity, a new starting point. In this sense, there is another conversation that Lihuel is having with the history of art, not only with the artists of the ’60s, but with others closer to her, those who at the beginning of the 2000s claimed aesthetics trash in the Argentine art scene. In both cases, garbage appears as a central element for the creation of new works. However, unlike his recent ancestors, there is no violence or aggressiveness in the pieces that Lihuel created for The utilities. Here the installation shown has an absolute elegance, it is a clean and tidy mess. Content. The north would seem to be in finding brilliance in a forgettable and tiny object. In giving a banana peel or a handful of cigarette butts the opportunity to shine. Who defines the end of things? When is an object ready to be discarded and buried in a city cemetery?
Lihuel González gives life to a net bag, a piece of wire, a twig, the remains of sculptures. She is like an on-call doctor who brings a dead person back into this world by performing CPR. This installation, the pieces of furniture that build it, and the photos it contains, are a revenge for all these objects. A way to persist over time, even if the indifference of others has abandoned them on the street. So, this urban drift that this artist practices is not only an inert and unjustified walk, but rather an act of historical reparation for these miniatures that were discarded. Walking is a gesture of poetic justice.
CATALOG PORTRAITS
In the mid-90s, the artist and photographer Alejandro Kuropatwa made a resounding turn in his career: he abandoned black and white and turned to color. The kickoff to that change was some photographs he took of all the medication he consumed daily to combat HIV. From that impulse emerged his best-known series, Cocktail. In the pill blister packs, he saw jewelry and portrayed them as if they were beauty products. An important clarification: he did not make a living selling works, but rather photographing countless cosmetic products, which were produced by his family’s company, Vía Valrossa. Kuropatwa praised these little things and a second-rate rouge seemed like a first-rate one, closer to a Mac lipstick than to one from Avon. Several decades later, Lihuel González would seem to vindicate that gesture and apply it to his own work, since The utilities includes a series of portraits made of these small street objects.
The photos displayed in this show have the perfection of product photos. They generate the same deception that images in catalogs produce: they beautify an object even if they are a fart. González treats everything he finds on the street with great care and everything seems to have the same value as jewelry. When one is faced with the images of this exhibition it is very difficult to think that what is being shown is garbage. The puchos become gold nuggets, a feather into a very expensive cloth and a piece of glass into a diamond.
But beyond the gesture, these photographs also signify Lihuel’s return to that discipline. In his latest projects, this practice had been left in the background. The moving image was superimposed on this other one that is always still. Over the years, video and performance gained ground in his production – as happened with the works Rehearsal for three masks either Say almost the same, in which these two genres were combined. Now, photography appears as the indicated language to show these treasures. There is something that deeply unites these two things: photography is as portable as the objects that are portrayed in it. The utilities. A camera can fit in the same pocket that a few soda caps fit.
It is the practice itself that gives rise to the magic pass, that which transforms anything into a work of art. The camera is the magic wand. What was previously nothing, becomes something the moment it is captured by the device. That is one of the possibilities that photography offers: returning the mystery to something inert and forgotten. The moment Lihuel portrayed these remains, he gave them a new life and a new meaning. Nothing that these portraits exhibit has life outside the image. If we saw the same objects in real life that are in the photos, we would probably see what most people do: garbage. But what we see is not that, but their photos, the same ones that work like a furniture polish, like a substance capable of restoring the shine to anything full of dirt.
The utilities It can be visited until the end of June at the Gachi Pietro gallery, Uriarte 1373. Monday to Friday, from 2 to 7 p.m.; Saturdays from 3pm. Free.
