Carrie Bencardino: Light strokes, punk heart

Carrie enters the museum with her face painted like the characters in her works. Dark shadows blur between her eyes and eyebrows, she has ear gauges, a spiderweb tattooed on her head , and other drawings that climb from her hands to her arms and from her chest to her neck. Several piercings. A gaze that widens and sharpens when she faces you head-on to answer questions.

It's easy to keep track of the name he chose for himself, when he was 15, the same name as the succulent, marginal character in Stephen King 's classic. On the day of the pre-opening of his exhibition, he's the only prominent punk at Malba. He even contrasts with the palette he uses to paint his oil paintings, with his all-black clothes and electric orange locks sprouting from his semi-shaven hairstyle.

Hers is a stimulating experience . Of the 11 unpublished works she presents in this exhibition, The Devil's Exhumation —her first institutional exhibition—one is a video, and the other 10 are scenes painted with a swift stroke that advances insolently. Without even asking their owner's permission. They have an out-of-focus finish generated by dragging the pigment with a turpentine rag, which freezes movement in time with aquatic precision. "Nothing de-eroticizes me more than the flat, the static," she exclaims with fearless caution. "I choose the way of seeing the world of the crooked, the distorted."

The museum's accompanying text suggests that "the notion of fluidity is a constant element in her work, both in her non-binary identity and in the way she manipulates material, escaping defined details."

The entire room is a sleek, refined fuchsia that envelops with a teleporting force. Carrie speaks of the context, a time that she believes "overwhelms the muscle of the imagination, leaving little room for the possibility of dreaming." She speaks of a crisis of projection, fueled by "the advance of a type of thinking that tends to dissolve the bonds between people." Along with curator Carlos Gutiérrez , they therefore sought to ensure that The Devil's Exhumation did not have a linear narrative, but rather a interwoven one. It was in the realm of the dreamlike.

Looking up from this ground floor with its glass ceiling, the work "Conversation" acts as a floating sky. A dark and chic surrealism emanates from it, also reflected in the room design by Gutiérrez, which, through curved walls and orthogonal viewpoints—rarely found in everyday settings—evokes the sensation of walking through a Lynchian set. Or one of those lurid dreams in which you are in one place but suddenly, as if by magic, you are somewhere else.

As the viewer enters, the space becomes disconcerting and rarefied. The most exciting of the series, according to this author, is an elongated horizontal image of a hearse entitled "There Is No More After This ," which is like watching death unfold before your very eyes at full speed to a psychedelic thrash metal song. "I reclaim the nightmare as a revolutionary state , that of the ungoverned, that which erupts without our being able to control it in an era in which networks algorithmize even the realm of the unconscious," Carrie postulates, and in this she also cites the book "24-7: Capitalism in the Assault of the Dream," by the American art critic Jonathan Crary .

In front of a portrait of what appears to be a virgin, who, dejected and inconsolable, sobs with alkaline tears, he says he never identified with the Church. But, to kill the time he had to spend there during his early life, his attention was genuinely focused on those images. Today, he doesn't consider them very unrelated to his own work. Perhaps this is his own bible . Or, in his words, an essay on his own existence in this world.