CENTRAL FINE 

El Otro Pozo Ciego/ Night Vision 

Leonor Fini, Alina Neyman, Mar Perez, Zelmira Rizo, Lucrecia Zappi

 Opening March 9th-April 24th, 5-8 PM

If one falls into El Pozo Ciego[i], where does one land? How do we approach the geometries of language, the infrastructure of desire, and its triad of turns and twists within a dark, vertiginous, and tubular space?  Gravity and vision converge as we trip into these realms, and everything occurs in a second. Various architectures and bodies intersect with language, marked by transformations and punctuated by borders that foster a sense of intimacy, both private and external—a concept that Lacan termed “extimity”[ii].

The paintings by Alina Neyman and Lucrecia Zappi manifest this vacuum, and both artists expand a reading into a hive of free associations, through various methods of paint application that create tension against these lonely landscapes. Neyman’s desolate parking lots, facades of temples, and abandoned buildings, engage in dialogue with Zappi’s empty interiors, when addressing certain facets of modernism, such as the grid as an emblem of social order.

Zappi’s inner constructions - be it an empty swimming pool, or direct references to Brazilian modernist architecture - ponder how one perceives space, leaving active marks on it. Gestural lines appear floating or engraved on the paintings, as countless ways of retelling a story. “Inhabiting a place involves an ever-changing memory, with its hidden dreams, forbidden doors and the illusion of intimacy.”[iii]

Zelmira Rizo introspects, attuning to the body to “draw out” pulses, images, and information that would otherwise remain latent. “The marks and compositions that unfold hold a mirror and generate new vocabulary and structures for perceiving, interpreting, and articulating the pressure in my chest, the tension in my neck and back, the congestion in my head. Drawing translates and maps feeling into form while digesting it.”[iv]

Oil-painted tarot cards by Mar Perez, set against found and crushed cans, invoke themes of chance and the nomadic, embodying elements that float, yet remain elusive, discernible only through intuition. Mar refers to ‘The Arcane Without Name’ as a card of transformation and passage, proposing that the 13th card of the Major Arcana should serve as a new emblem for the Trans community. This card features a red heart positioned on the pelvis, its hue alluding to the decapitation of kings, outdated habits, and entrenched cultural constructs.  In some of his works, we see geometric volumes rendered in oil at low contrast, around figures such as El Rey Momo, a carnival character sporting a dildic nose, or a reclining figure, in a posture reminiscent of Goya’s nudes, meticulously overlaid with tarot imagery, surrounded by geometric planes that bring to mind mountains, panels in a set, as well as the taciturn light of the liminal and the unpredictable. 

Embodying roles that challenge normative standards while embracing the power of play, transformation, and exchange, the figures in Leonor Fini’s timeless drawings might appear as AI illustrations. Their form and attire evoke a sense of illusion, while asserting genuine presence and autonomy.

While looking at El Pozo Ciego, one establishes a border around one’s otherness. This border is a transparent, double-sided line that acknowledges that language alone cannot encapsulate one’s practice, voice, body, or body of work. In the confines of that “hole-intimacy,” pupils dilate to adapt, cultivating a form of Night Vision[v]. Perimeters become speculative. We ‘touch’ to perceive, discovering that seeing and seeking coexist as fundamental components of art. 

Leonor Fini (b Buenos Aires, 30 August 1907 – 18 January 1996, Paris). In her lifetime, Fini was the subject of retrospective exhibitions in Belgium (1965), Italy (1983), Japan (1972-73, 1985-86), and France (1986). Additional retrospectives were staged posthumously at institutions in Italy (2005, 2009), Japan (2005), Germany (1997-98), and Sweden (2014), and the artist’s first U.S. Museum survey was staged at New York’s Museum of Sex from 2018 until 2019, followed by solo exhibition at the Lilley Museum of Art, University of Nevada, Reno in 2021. In 2021 and 2022, her work was included in the expansive exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders at Tate Modern in London. In 2022, Fini was prominently included in The Witch’s Cradle, one of five historical sections embedded within The Milk of Dreams, the main exhibition of the 59th Venice Biennale.

Alina Neyman (b. Buenos Aires 1934, lives in Salta, Argentina). Considered one of the most influential painters in the northwest of Argentina, Neyman is the recipient of many national awards in Argentina, including the National Award to Artistic Trajectory, 2020/2021. Her body of work examines Abstraction in relationship to a sense of localness and the quotidian, as well as the exportation of modernism into Latin America and its synthesis in the 50’s. The Museo de Bellas Artes de Salta recently presented a retrospective and a catalogue of her work, under the curatorship of Gracia Martinez Arias. This is the first presentation of her work at CENTRAL FINE. 

Mar Perez (b. Salta 1983, Argentina. He studied arts at the National University of Córdoba. Since then, he began a sustained career in painting and his work can be seen in multiple individual and group exhibitions.  At the same time, he creates multidisciplinary pieces from individual and collective practice. He investigates and carries out strong work in theater from different roles, mainly from scriptwriting and direction, as well as acting, film production and casting. His performance in Terminal Norte (2021), a recent film production by Lucrecia Martel, stands out. He is a musician and goes under the name Dptculos. He was part of the La San Luis theater company and a member of the musical groups Chinha, El Distancia Amarelo and Whiskey. He is a member of Loro, an artist duo with Mario Llullaillaco. He participated with Remota in ARCOmadrid 2024, along with Roxana Ramos and received the award for the best stand in the Opening section of the fair. He currently lives in Salta, Argentina. This is his first presentation at CENTRAL FINE.

Zelmira Rizo (b. 1995, Miami, FL; Peruvian/Argentine descent) has a BA from Cornell University with studies in biology, comparative literature, and architecture (2018), and is an MFA candidate (2025) in Visual Arts at Columbia University. Rizo has exhibited at CENTRAL FINE, Miami; the Rare Book and Manuscripts Library, Columbia University; Wallach Art Gallery, NY; SK Gallery, NY; Olive Tjaden Gallery, Ithaca, among other venues. She is a fellow at the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies and will be Assistant Adjunct Professor at Columbia University this Summer. She was a recipient of the Miami Individual Artist Grant (2023); resident artist at the Bakehouse Art Complex, Miami (2022, 2023); and Curatorial Fellow and Research Assistant at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2019, 2020). 

Lucrecia Zappi (b. 1972, Buenos Aires) studied at the Rietveld Academy and pursued careers both on cultural journalism and as a fiction writer. Now she returns to her keen interest in visual arts through painting. In Brazil, she studied journalism and worked for the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo for years, covering mainly visual arts subjects, where she currently has a monthly column. She lives and works In New York, where she earned a Creative Writing Master’s degree at NYU.  With Mil-folhas (São Paulo, 2009), a gastronomic journey through the history of sweets, she won the prestigious Bologna Ragazzi award in 2011. She is the author of three novels, all originally written in Portuguese (Brazil) and translated to Spanish (Spain): Onça Preta (2013), Acre (2017) and Degelo (2023). Acre was a finalist in the “novel” category of the Jabuti award, the most prestigious in Brazil. On canvas and drawings on paper - she questions the sense of otherness (a central subject in all her novels, as a reflection of the multiple places where she has lived) by building vacant human spaces, stage like, where time is perceived in perpetual rotation. To explore that experience of time she leans, for example, on natural structures such as undulating shell forms or spiderwebs – be it in an aquatic garden or in a domestic confined space. This is her first presentation at CENTRAL FINE

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Notes

[i] El Pozo Ciego  an underground tank that collects household waste including human waste. In the North of Argentina is also considered as  a liminal, dangerous and mysterious channel, with no light, and no end.

[ii] Extimity: Jacques Lacan created the signifier in formulated the 7th Seminar to indicate that what we perceive as intimate, is indeed made by the exterior. The phantasmatic marks that touch the subject, forms the interiority, creating a paradoxical relationship with the Other that inhabits us.

[iii] Lucrecia Zappi’s contribution to this text on her own works. 

[iv] Zelmira Rizo’s contribution to this text on her own works

[v] Night Vision is a song included in Solitude Standing, Suzanne Vega’s second studio album, released in 1987, published by A&M.