the color yellow as politics

Yellow is not defined by a single hue, a single name: lemon, lime, gold, gold, amber, Indian, topaz, mustard. In addition, there is yellowish and naranjiblanco. The subtlety of the difference is manifested when a careful look goes beyond the classificatory systems that tend to unify and simplify into standardized and impersonal categories. In the rooms of the Travesía Cuatro gallery, the Argentine artist Mariela Scafati (Olivos, 1973) once again carried out an exercise that is not just a formal reflection of this tone, but a reflection of his practice as an activist.

His installations literally hang on the walls and occupy spaces such as MALBA or the Buenos Aires Modern Museum; the Hamburger Bahnhof and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, as part of the 11th Berlin Biennale; the new Collegium, in Arévalo, Ávila, or the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. They all arise from the artist’s collective experience and experience..

Since two thousand years ago, his networks and actions have been linked to Taller Popular de Serigrafía and Queer Serigraphers, and he is part of Cromoactivists, a collective that brings together Marina De Caro, Daiana Rose, Victoria Musotto and Guille Mongan. These groups take to the streets and write proclamations support movements for the legalization of abortion and against gender-based violence and feminicides.

Scafati's CV is essential so that this exhibition does not just come across as something brilliant and with a certain irony

the practice of serigraphya revolutionary technique due to its accessibility, as it allows the reproduction of an image or text in any medium through a mesh stretched across a frame, this is what also led him to present the project “La Radio Electrónica Artesanal”, with Lola Granilloat the exhibition graphic touch at the Reina Sofia Museum in 2022.

Talking about this extensive and performative curriculum is essential so that your exhibition does not just come across as something surprising, brilliant, engaging and with a certain irony. Scafati carries out an investigation of composition linked to the assumptions of art history. But also, in each of the screens that make up all the pieces, in each connecting action, in each hinge that articulates them, in each rope that supports them, he tells us that tones are politicalthat contexts can be redefined based on resistance and that bonds can be established based on desire and not ties.

These paintings become landscape and transform into body. “You, me, her and him / in the sun / looking at / the sun”, says the poem by Mariano Blatt accompanies the exhibition. The operations carried out by the artist take us to the meta-schemes of Brazilian culture Hélio Oiticicato the “silhouette” and the absence of bodies in works created during and despite Latin American dictatorships, to the tying games of Japanese kinbaku.

All this historiography, here, is embodied: the little squares that look like figures respond to the measurements of real people, in this case herself, are identities; the fabric screens that look like slopes and skies are situations. And both bodies and territories propose a choreography that, breaking pictorial limits, subverts and adapts to the subjectivities that make up society.

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