Unfenced – Milu Correch & Irene Lasivita

UNFENCED
Milu Correch & Irene Lasivita

Pretty Portal, Düsseldorf

3 October – 13 November
Opening reception: Saturday, 3 Oktober, 7–10 pm

UUnfenced brings together two Argentine artists whose work seems, at first glance, to move in opposite directions. Milu Correch paints the street corners of her own Buenos Aires neighborhood — a rusted combi, parked motorcycles, a boy crouched under a tree by an iron gate. Irene Lasivita paints figures that have no fixed address at all: women fusing with deer, birds, foliage, their bodies caught mid-transformation in dense, dreamlike undergrowth. One artist works from observation, the other from invention. Placed side by side, though, they turn out to be doing the same thing from opposite ends.

Correch’s Buenos Aires is never simply documentary. Her scenes carry a charge that has nothing to do with what is literally pictured — a vibration under the everyday, an energy that resists full explanation. She works outside formal art education, and it shows in the directness of her eye: color and gesture do the narrating, while the image itself withholds as much as it reveals. Correch speaks of a visual poetry that refuses transparency — the viewer has to complete the story. Not everything is said. In her recent work, this instinct tips further into magical realism, letting the marvelous surface from within a corner everyone would otherwise walk straight past.

Lasivita starts from the opposite pole and arrives at the same threshold. Trained at the Fernando Fader School of Arts in Buenos Aires and shaped since by independent research into posthumanist thought, relational ontologies and Amerindian perspectivism, she builds pictorial worlds where the line between human and non-human, nature and culture, simply does not hold. Her most recent paintings turn further toward the oneiric — staged as passages into dream logic, where a figure’s register can shift mid-canvas and the marvelous is treated as a plain fact of the world.

What the two practices share is a way of seeing. Neither artist inherited it from the Western pictorial tradition, which has long kept the wild separate from the domestic, the mythic separate from the real. Lasivita invents a cosmology from research and imagination; Correch extracts hers from direct observation of one specific street. Different materials, same gesture: a refusal to fence the magical off into “elsewhere.” Unfenced proposes that the enchanted and the everyday were never on opposite sides of a boundary — in the city as much as beyond it, the territory has always been porous.

About the artists

Milu Correch (b. 1991, Buenos Aires) is an Argentine muralist whose vivid, narrative-driven work has been seen on walls across the globe, from major urban centers to remote rural communities. Working outside formal art education, she fuses traditional technique with a contemporary eye, producing scenes that strike the viewer on an instinctive, almost pre-verbal level.

IIrene Lasivita (b. 1983, Buenos Aires) is an Argentine visual artist whose practice expands painting through muralism, virtual reality, immersive media and installation. Trained at the Fernando Fader School of Arts, she has since built a practice fusing painting, philosophy, public art and emerging technologies, with painting remaining its conceptual core. Since 2010 she has also run independent teaching programs in drawing, composition and oil painting.