“Being an adult and being a girl, being rational and absurd, realistic and dreamlike — these contradictions coexist to keep me alive.” - Mara Faúndez.
“At 26, being a woman is to live in contradiction — between childhood and adulthood.” — Florencia Viñuela.
GIRL, SO CONFUSING
The path separating the childish idea once desired from the version that time dictates is a dislocation that rarely finds true synchronicities. The years of error can sometimes be too long. For some, it is nothing more than an infinite spiral with no escape, sometimes ending in the grave. On the scale of social imperatives, no one is ever sufficiently prepared for the impact of fulfilling the expectation of becoming the person others demand, especially when confronted with the exalted and imponderable desires nurtured by experience, the intimate traces that constitute the genesis of our sensitive condition. The very fact of being alive, of feeling attachment and correspondence to what identifies us, to the meaningful things that speak of our history, the life crystallized and turned into memory, is somehow implicit in our everyday existence. No one is truly prepared for the impact of this clash, least of all artists.
The exhibition "Girl, so confusing" by Mara Faúndez and Florencia Viñuela compiles different layers and facets of feminine intimacy, partly rebellious, partly archetypal, exalting the contemplative and fetishistic dimensions of everyday situations and objects. In Florencia Viñuela's work, this is articulated through accessories, modes of dress, and circumstantial details: the light falling on a face fixed on a phone screen in a dimly lit room, or the headphones worn by an anonymous individual with a pierced ear made translucent by the effect of light. There is also the close-up of lingerie slightly shifted, and the imprecise scattering of clasps, lighters, keychains, and pills spread across a bed.
In Mara Faúndez's case, her paintings unfold as a narrative, through small signs functioning as clues to a story of moods, love, and passionate states. They are mostly objects caught in unfinished activity, suggestions of experiences not necessarily comfortable, or perhaps so, only at the point where the dream of ideal things happily comes to an end.
Girl, so confusing is the sacred individuality of a handbag on the shoulder: there is no better way to know someone and their behavior than by listing the objects they carry. A complex network of aesthetic and utilitarian decisions that express the unmistakable profile of every subjectivity. The paintings of Mara Faúndez and Florencia Viñuela are a glimpse into the room shared with a soulmate: the confidences that remain untouchable, the unfinished stories of love and friendship, the family secrets, the real and fictional encounters woven by the machinery of desire, modesty, and the embarrassing situations that matter to no one as much as to ourselves-the reason why we seek, in the present, the justification for our acts.
Diego Maureira
Art theorist, curator, writer, lecturer.
Santiago, October 2025
