Florencia Böhtlingk
Juro que todo esto sucedió en un día
Obras 2010—2024

“I want to tell everything without moving,” Florencia Böhtlingk (Buenos Aires, 1966) once wrote in her diaries. This expression of the sense of urgency that has led her to constantly decipher and record life, driven by an inexhaustible capacity for wonder and a passion for the pictorial, is one of the threads that weaves together the more than ninety works making up this exhibition. Produced between 2010 and 2024,
watercolors and paintings offer a panorama of a unique style that combines geometry and gesture: images multiply, merging landscape with individual and social habits to reflect life in the city of Buenos Aires, the shores of the Río de la Plata or the forest of Misiones Province.

Böhtlingk’s oeuvre is the aftereffect of the force with which she was beguiled by both painting—an encounter she describes as “love at first sight”—and nature—which bedazzled her in the early 1990s, when she visited Misiones with friends, on the trail of the Moconá Falls. The challenge then was how to convey a reality that went far beyond the fantasies she had previously committed to canvas. These consisted in strange fragments of plants against luminous backgrounds or echoes of the idea of a lost and so non-existent paradise. Yet, standing before the irrefutable sight of the forest, the imperative to capture that landscape proved frustrating. It was the dawning realization that painting could detach itself from naturalistic representation and, following its own codes, take a different path while still staying true
to reality that allowed her to embark with conviction on the long journey that brings us together today—an adventure in which the approach to reality can, in the artist’s words, be pure fantasy.

Her motifs emerged immediately: mountain views and triangular skies resting between the slopes, zigzagging red dirt roads, and waterfalls. Soon, too, the territory’s inhabitants appeared—flocks of birds, locals, the artist’s friends, the artist herself—as well as a new environment: the nature reserves along the banks of the Río de la Plata, and the islands of the Tigre Delta with its streams and rituals, and she and her colleagues devoted—again without moving—to painting it all. Relying on the touchstones of color and drawing, the elements in her works gradually organized themselves into a jigsaw-like pattern: there, the absence of perspective and hierarchy between the figures and between the figures and their background allowed her to arrange the materials of daily existence undifferentiatedly and to compile an emotional inventory of the world around her.

This has remained the challenge ever since: for painting to serve as a plastic test in the deciphering of reality and as a costumbrist, cartographical chronicle of everyday life in which reality is revealed as a succession of dazzling, though not tension-free events. “I swear this all happened in a day” is not simply
Böhtlingk’s retort to the skeptics but testimony that artistic work can, when motivated by persistence and emotion, be key to discovering in the ordinary the particular and the infinite.

—Alejandra Aguado, Curator