maharlika gaming What to See in N.Y.C. Galleries in December
This week in Newly Reviewed, Travis Diehl covers Luis Fernando Benedit’s pop-psychedelic pieces, Andres Serrano and Benjamin Bertocci’s rough paintings, Michael Iveson’s reverse A.I. and Martina Cox’s watercolor bodices.
Tribeca
Luis Fernando BeneditThrough Jan. 25. Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, 142 Franklin Street, Manhattan; islaa.org.
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Luis Fernando Benedit (1937-2011) was a star Argentine conceptualist. This survey — his biggest in New York City since 1972 — focuses on two phases of his career: the molten pop-psychedelic paintings from the late 1960s and the acrylic bug habitats from around 1970.
The paintings fling cartoonish social invectives. Some refer to traditional dishes of the working class: “Coniglio a la cacciatora (Rabbit Cacciatore),” 1967, depicts a kind of cutaway cartoon rabbit, its bones and organs visible and its face frozen in a red-eyed glare. Another from that year, “La gran cocción (the Great Cooking),” sets vaguely intestinal, dainty pink and blue forms frothing in a pot. The anarchic disdain behind “Silla presidencial con aparato eyector (Presidential Chair With Ejecting Apparatus),” 1996, a turdlike politician launched through space, is unvarnished.
An impending junta shadowed this period of Benedit’s life. Artists and intellectuals were among the thousands “disappeared” by death squads between 1974 and 1983. Benedit’s systems art, especially the transparent tabletop environments he built for ants, snails, spiders and other critters, presumably slipped more easily past censors and reactionaries.
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