Patricia Bentancur

Patricia Bentancur lives and works in Montevideo, Uruguay

She works with photograhy, video, objects and sounds.

Her different series oscilates between the matter of public and private, social and personal. It also underlines her concerns arround language and the impossibility of communication, words, memory and loss.

She has shown her work extensively in Uruguay and abroad, among many others: Modern Art Museum of Buenos Aires, Argentina -- Museum of Contemporary Art of Chile – National Museum of Visual Art, Uruguay – Blanes Museum of Arts, Uruguay –Contemporary Art Museum, Bogota-Colombia – Memorial Latinoamericano, San Pablo – Brazil -- International Video Retrospective of the IV Salón de Arte Digital Centro Cultural Cinematográfico ICAIC / VI Salón y Coloquio Internacional de Arte Digital Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, CUBA. In 2003 she participates in a Barcelona and London exhibition organized by The Video Art Foundation, she was invited for the International Foro of the Havana Biennial in Cuba, International Biennial of Chile, -Biennale Internationale Des Arts Electroniques “Interferences 2000”, Belfort, France—“Biennial” of Electronic Art in Rosario, Argentina and for the International Biennial of the Mercosur in Brazil.

In 2005 presents “memorias sumergidas” in MarteUPMarket Gallery, Montevideo , Uruguay

The strategy of rediscovery and perpetuate an image

the work of Patricia Bentancur

By Gabriel Peluffo Linari

The first intervention coats the object with a soft and homogeneous medium divesting it of its aspect and its original meanings; but the second re-iconizes it, turns it photographically into a fetish and confronts the offence of the immersion by “purifying” it into a new image. The series produce a collection of iconographic shrouds that seem intent on re-conferring symbolic power onto those archetypes of memory.

The videocamera records how this ritual matrix is reproduced by other people with their own objects, offering a de-personalizing ethical way out to the possible narcissistic connotations of the project.

The clue lies in the double gesture upon the object-symbol: the physical immersion that reverts into the ascent to photography's virtual space. The material swallowing followed by a rediscovery involves a double metaphor, archaeological and baptismal, for the regression to the womb implies the hope of a re-birth. A hope that is frustrated when Bentancur stages –in one of the photographs—the suicide of the object. This faulty act of death is an oblique way to represent forgetting; a mode of forgetting without guilt, for it is the remembered person-object itself that by its own autonomous will ends its life.

Materiality affects only one of the works: Wedding ring , a ring of thistles, the intimate objectualization of amorous martyrdom, seen as a miniature “crown of thorns”. The fantasy of swallowing returns, though embodied in a miniature whose hope of salvation resides in the smallest cavity of the womb and the cave.

This participation implies a transit from the Freudian (S.Freud) to the Jungian (C.G.Jung) categories.

If we were to abide to the dualism that Gilbert Durand calls the nocturnal order (descent) and diurnal order (ascent) of the image, Bentancur's iconography would belong to both epistemological categories regarding the operative process of its construction. Original reference: Durand, Gilbert, Las estructuras antropológicas de lo imaginario [The anthropological structures of the imaginary], Taurus, Madrid, 1982.

The relationship between the miniature and the analogy of the cave is almost a constant in Bentancur's recent works, in whose installations this idea sometimes is even shaped as a small house where the visitor isolates himself. In the case of re-visits the miniature condition of all her loved objects is even to be found in the blown-up representations as if the change in scale did not affect the ontological nature of the “miniature status”. Susan Sontag has established a poetic parallel between the camera obscura and Plato's cave.

Famed iconologist Aby Warburg, in his Mnemosyne , presents a constellation of images related to each other by an analytical script that is its own epistemological discourse, but also related by an iconic condition that levels them out: they are black and white photographs shot without much ado, just for record's sake. Thus, Warburg expresses those images taking away their sensual look along with a major portion of their aesthetic attributes (in turn already diminished due to the fact that they are re-presentations) and exposes the archetypal framework, the symbolic blueprint of that iconography.

In the works of Patricia Bentancur there also exists a first techno-tribal operation that evens out the objects by coating them with an homogeneous substance, divesting them of their aesthetic attributes along with their original meanings. But, there is a second operation that photographically re-iconizes them, rendering them fetishes, in accordance with an aesthetic that, although in itself also levelling, confronts the act of physical immersion of the real object with the “purification” of its de-materialized image into virtual space. The resulting image is a mnesic fossil.

If Warburg strove to find, in his Mnemosyne , the archetypal remainders of antiquity –the diagrams of ancestral human reactions—the series of images Bentancur develops (which is not, as in Warburg's ideal, an “atlas of images”, it does have the virtue of the possibility of being an ad infinitum sequence) consists in a collection of iconographical shrouds, the shrouds of the mnesic remainders intent on neutralizing –at a strictly symbolic level—the secret power of the archetypes of memory that survive in our lives. The ritual matrix of Bentancur's work consists in this: a matrix the artist strives to extend towards the participation of other people able to reproduce the same act of transfiguration with their own objects (recorded on video) anticipating in this way a de-personalizing ethical answer to possible narcissistic connotations of the project. This participation means a transit from Freudian (S.Freud) to Jungian (C.G.Jung) categories.

The key to Bentancur's work is in the double gesture applied to the object-symbol, that is to say in the operative sequence of a physical immersion that reverts into the ascent to a virtual space through the photographic act. The essential act is the first one, the immersion in a liquid, sticky, thick medium that then requires a while to set. Wthin the act of the immersion (considered as a material swallowing gesture and at the same time one of re-discovery) lies the archaeological metaphor of this work, and the baptismal metaphor too, for the regression to the womb every immersion implies encloses the hope of a re-birth.

If we were to abide by what Gilbert Durand calls the nocturnal order (descent) and the diurnal order (ascent) of the image, Bentancur's iconography would participate in both epistemological categories, it would stand on the borderline that separates them. A baptism implies, precisely, the double operation that the work poses, I mean: first the phase of sacrificial ritual (descending) which then makes way for the beginning (ascending) of a “new life”. Nevertheless, at the same time, Bentancur seems to mock this transfiguration when she stages –in the last of the images—the suicide of the object. This iconic thematization of death is an oblique way to represent forgetting, pointing –by the way—towards the existential autonomy of each engram * of memory. Forgetting without guilt, for it is not the memory-invested individual who eliminates the image but the image that, by its own autonomous will, kills itself.

There are previous works by Patricia Bentancur where objects are not small biography-carrier bibelots but objects built by the artist herself in an hyperbolic act that fuses together symbol and substance in one single thing. One of those pieces – Wedding ring— re-appears at this show as evidence of the referred act, essentially opposite to the complex metaphor of swallowing and baptism to be found in the rest of the works exhibited. Wedding ring –a ring made of thistles—is the intimate objectualization of amorous martyrdom but at the same time it is the miniaturization of the “crown of thorns”. So it is that in this miniaturization the swallowing fantasy re-appears, the regressive fantasy of salvation by smallness, that permits to seek refuge in the womb and in the cave. The relationship between the miniature and the analogy of the cave –which at times has been shaped as a “visiting house” is almost a constant in Bentancur's recent work, to the extent that the miniature condition all her loved objects share can also be found in their representation once they are coated by the immersion in the bath. The shift in scale and density resulting from the photographic blow-ups maintains the ontological miniature status of the objects, true “ghosts of interiority” reconstructed in Niepce's camera obscura.

Gabriel Peluffo Linari

Architect and Director of the National Museum Blanes, resercher in Latin American Art, he had published various books and essays in Uruguay and abroad. He also lecture in differents international Foros.

* Every event that affects living substance leaves a trace that Richard Semon calls an “engram”. The potential energy conserved in the engram (whose mnemic energy behaves, Semon states, according to the laws of physics) may, in the adequate conditions, be re-activated and released through the action of remembering. Original reference: Richard Semon, “Die Mneme als arhaltendes...”Leipzig, 1908. Quoted by Gombrich, E.H., Aby Warburg, una biografía intelectual, Alianza Forma, Madrid, 1992.

This participation implies a transit from the Freudian (S.Freud) to the Jungian (C.G.Jung) categories.

If we were to abide to the dualism that Gilbert Durand calls the nocturnal order (descent) and diurnal order (ascent) of the image, Bentancur's iconography would belong to both epistemological categories regarding the operative process of its construction. Original reference: Durand, Gilbert, Las estructuras antropológicas de lo imaginario [The anthropological structures of the imaginary], Taurus, Madrid, 1982.

The relationship between the miniature and the analogy of the cave is almost a constant in Bentancur's recent works, in whose installations this idea sometimes is even shaped as a small house where the visitor isolates himself. In the case of re-visits the miniature condition of all her loved objects is even to be found in the blown-up representations as if the change in scale did not affect the ontological nature of the “miniature status”. Susan Sontag has established a poetic parallel between the camera obscura and Plato's cave.

* Every event that affects living substance leaves a trace that Richard Semon calls an “engram”. The potential energy conserved in the engram (whose mnemic energy behaves, Semon states, according to the laws of physics) may, in the adequate conditions, be re-activated and released through the action of remembering. Original reference: Richard Semon, “Die Mneme als arhaltendes...”Leipzig, 1908. Quoted by Gombrich, E.H., Aby Warburg, una biografía intelectual, Alianza Forma, Madrid, 1992.

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