Valeria Conte Mac Donell: “I want a drawing to support me”

The Santander Foundation Award for Visual Arts awarded to the artist Valeria Conte Mac Donell (1977) for its installation “Cold thread” and the curator Jimena Ferreiro, It opened a few days ago in the immense headquarters of the bank located on Paseo Colón Avenue.

Since Conte Mac Donell He settled in Patagonia and began to intervene the landscape, the artistic environment discovered and valued its poetic and magical facilities and performances. First were pure ice threads. In the winter of 2011 she clearly described the execution procedure and the materials of these works called “Conquest of the useless”, Title that refers to the free art, to that plus that gives us with its single presence. “Weigh with ice the walls of my house. I irrigate at night. When the sun rises, I see them melt and disappear”. (5,000 meters of tanza woven vertically on construction irons. Registered and frozen. Villa Quilquihue, Neuquén).

In an exhibition of 2016, the artist presented her embroidery on paper. Today she is determined to embroider her own landscape in the sky. From the trajectory of a thread of any nature, mostly wires, the drawing defines its work.

During the vernissage of “Cold thread”on the big screen of the Santander stage the images of Conte Mac Donell floating in the middle of the sky on abstract wire lines that support the weight of your body. In these scenarios of immeasurable dimensions and a portentous beauty, the mountains are seen on the snowy peaks. “I want a drawing to support me”claims the artist. And add: “I’m drawing”. The rapport with the work is absolute. This drawing-performatics is called “May the sky be the back” Already the loneliness of the first works a team of attendees composed of six people is opposed, including, sometimes, on occasion, Leonor Bedelhis mother, in charge of lighting.

Meanwhile, cut over a starry sky, the drawings of the “Swimmer” and a horse called “Palomo”they are accompanied by poems that betray the artist’s extreme intersubjectivity with the characters of her works. “Palomo /slept, it was late at night. /The blow to you in the window.

And he continues: “His tender eyes convinced you. Holding from his white crines, he climbed it. /Slowly stopped. Your thighs had The eyes closed, you tried to fasten your jacket but preferred not to release the crines, or loosen the strength of your legs. Swimming in the air.

The work, distant as a mirage, was made in 2012 with 80 kg of alambron suspended at 9 meters high. The sublime condition of nature and work awakens sensitivity. Meanwhile, the extreme experiences of these continuous epic, talk about a story that has not yet ended and induces the viewer to follow the artist’s destiny.

While maintaining the calm of his teaching work, the images of his actions have a theatrical drama. Among them is a simple story apparently: “How to leave a ship”In attempt I, he says:“ In November 2017 they gave me a ship, a sailboat that never touched the water, I left for four pieces and took it to the garden of my house. From that day I look for how to abandon it. ”The attempts were several and the ship, rebuilt with wires and ropes is the theme of twenty -two notebooks dedicated to the illusory ships that sailed the sky. Mac Donell’s visions provide proof of an inexhaustible imagination.

One of his latest works is exhibited on the Terrace del Santander, it is one of the performance figures “If so”presented at the Uruguayan Sea in 2023.

In the Santander Foundation they are defenders of sustainability, social and financial inclusion; They promote creativity and invite you to see the mountain range in Buenos Aires. The artist and the curator went down from heaven to represent the mountains of the Andes with earth. “How to transport the landscape of the mountain range to distant contexts?” Jimena Ferreiro is questioned. The answer is right there, inside that immense glazed space. “The mountains on a reduced scale that occupy a large part of the surface of the room are made of mud: the same one with which Valeria built her home connecting the present with the ancestral knowledge. The matter has memory and our body too. Fiction is a transformative force capable of exorcising the time and producing new realities,” concludes the curator.

The president of the Foundation, Guillermo Tempesta Leedsconfirmed: “This award, seeks to strengthen the sustained commitment for more than five years, with the contemporary art scene in Argentina.” As a jury member with Carlos Huffmann, Nicola Costantino, Lucrecia Palacios Hidalgo and Elena Tavelli, executive director of the Foundation, points out that the project was unanimously elected and granted the sum of $ 40,000 for its realization.