The exhibition  Bañista  by Magdalena Contreras Mekis, successor to the exhibition  Ballad of Winter  – an instance in which the artist addressed the coldest time of the year – is a new essay on the seasons, and which presents a somewhat decadent and overflowing interpretation of the summer.

From the video "Bañista" (2020) with which Magdalena put an apocalyptic accent around a vacation in Brazil - which coincided with the beginning of Covid-19 and an atmosphere of lethargy and incipient chaos -, it was begins an exercise of distrust in the environment, one in which the elements are sinister actors of the hidden: waves that flood, light that dazzles, sands that observe and trees that whisper secret plans that will never be known. 

This time, Centella ice cream, seagulls, hoses and a group of Iranian girls – in a context prior to the Islamic Revolution of 1978 and as an event of solidarity – are the accomplices of an uncertain summer scene, and they make up both the personal imagination of the artist, like that of an entire generation that grew up using Rayito de Sol sunscreen and witnessing the summer rituals of friends, sisters and mothers. 

Using affective and irony as resources, Magdalena's work explores this new topic through a pictorial exercise sensitive to her own subjectivity, at the same time appealing to the literality of the referents. Now, revisited from a palette of primary colors that is gradually becoming dirty, the elements look gradually rarefied, giving the environment an existentialist note and a measured decadence that aims to force the viewer to distrust.

Bañista proposes a somewhat absurd summer, whose unfinished scenarios invite us to speculate about possible events in hot and aquatic conditions. And perhaps in a somewhat exaggerated attempt, he insists on questioning what globally should be “the best season of the year,” and about which he believes it is worth doubting.

More information on the event can be found here.