Buenos Aires
La frontera fantasma
VALENTINI /
Curator
Carolina Cuervo
Nov. 23, 2024 — Feb. 21, 2025
About exhibition
A flag waves in the liminal space between departure and return, a symbol of a people without solid ground, a franchise on another continent, an echo of identity in a foreign land, where the embrace of two peoples intertwines despite the distances. A houseplant without an owner, a space where the center looms as a distant promise, laden with whispers that resonate behind bars.
La Frontera Fantasma, the second exhibition by Dino Valentini at Galería COTT, emerges from the longing to establish a decentralized social unity. Through the question of the “local color” of the territory, reinterpreted from the minimal unit of the pixel, the artist examines the intersection between landscape and architecture, digital and analog, center and periphery, public and private space.
It is within this intermediate space, this liminal terrain, that the traveler—a key figure in the exhibition’s narrative—moves. Valentini’s previous practice in painting revisits gestures from the Situationist movement of the 1950s. Through a constructed operation that draws from the concept of psychogeography, the dérive overlays the era of GPS, creating a crossroads of spatial and temporal networks. Valentini traverses small towns in the interior of Córdoba province, collecting stories about the psychic effects that city layouts have on individuals. The traversed territory, made up of fragments and voids, of forgotten or erased zones, of public spaces that reveal themselves as fragile and riddled with fissures, becomes an alphabet of forms for image-making.
In the translation to painting, détournement¹ or diversion occurs. Borders are reorganized, explode, blur, expand, contract, zoom in, and pixelate. With his deceptive compositions, which evoke aerial or satellite views, Valentini erodes the rigidity of maps and constructs ghostly geographies.
The border ceases to be a fixed boundary and becomes a threshold of possibilities for new spatial configurations. Painting—on walls and on canvas—resists: its materiality challenges the illusory transparency of the pixel and reclaims the visible as experience, inhabiting the interstices where binary logic fails, to propose new forms of coexistence.
Curated and written by Carolina Cuervo
Selected works
GRADÍN /
Genealogía Vegetal
PAREDES /
El jardín interior
GÓMEZ /
Las vestiduras peligrosas
PECCI CAROU /
States of mind
JUNCADELLA /
Behind the eyes
PAREDES / GRADÍN / CORCUERA /
Ecology of beings
HELDEN / SANCINETI /
Entities fleeing
PAREDES /
Shadow and Light Pulsion
NÚÑEZ /
Fulgor
NÚÑEZ / CORCUERA / PÉREZ BOUZAS /
Without space, without time, without context
