beatriz buendia

Gabriela Gotoda, curator Diving is an intrinsically voluntary act. It begins with an impulse, but the decision to take the plunge is not impulsive. To lift the body into suspension and, moments later, submerge it into another medium is the result of an intentional positioning—a genuine desire that can no longer be contained. Curiosity and intention are fully experienced in this successive phenomenon of suspension and submersion. Each dive is a unique experience, even when repeated in the same context. The first dive, however, is always the most anticipated. It carries with it expectations of the unknown, opening and carrying the senses and the mind into the inaugural encounter with the experience of a particular kind of immersion. Beatriz Buendia: Primeiro mergulho is the artist’s first solo exhibition and presents paintings made over the past two years. The result of five years of exclusive dedication to the language of painting, the twenty paintings selected for the exhibition represent the main axis of an investigation developed in the studio, where experimentation with different methods of canvas preparation, pigmentation, and facture remains ongoing. Having established a consistent practice in small formats, the artist now also turns to larger supports, allowing her fields of expression and the gestural quality of her language to expand and intensify, becoming increasingly material and corporeal. The elements that constitute her works—oil paint, acrylic paint, oil stick, thickened gel medium, graphite, pencil, chalk, and gesso—are combined throughout an unconventional process in which preparation, composition, and finishing are informed simultaneously. The result is a facture in which layers and textures tell stories, establishing semiological relationships of the sensible that evoke memories and sensations resistant to objectification. Perhaps this is why Buendia’s painting seems almost to refuse the status of image. Her colors and marks are the substance of experience; they are a pure form of existing in space and time. Her pictorial language is neither lyrical abstraction, despite its rhythms and vibrations, nor formal abstraction, despite the constructive force of her gesture; it is an abstraction of its own, unconditional, one that touches upon the contemplative associations of existence. Buendia’s paintings thus constitute sensory fields, where the interactions between colors, marks, and gestures are at times subtle and at times intense, yet always shelter the events of a dynamic state of non-elaboration. Taking painting as the result of a free movement, the philosopher Vilém Flusser proposes that this phenomenon should not be explained, as one explains a problem, but rather deciphered, as one deciphers a riddle. Under this semantic paradigm, Buendia’s paintings present themselves as riddles to be entered. This inaugural quality resonates with an optimistic curiosity, free from prejudices or preconceived beliefs, echoed in the high contrasts, tones, and textures that characterize her language. The legibility of these relationships can be traced through the planes and sequences of gestural incursions, which continually place pictorial events within a state of indeterminacy. The impetuosity of Buendia’s gesture, which moves back and forth, arches across a field, fills spaces, and reverberates through every void, gives colors and marks an immanence of matter and light. It is as if, in her painting, we were seeing traces of an event—its impressions, incisions, and condensations—reconstituted on the canvas by a body that suspends itself in time in order to dive into it and revisit something. This applies both to the artist’s body, from which the gesture originates, and to the body of the viewer, witness to the traces of this gesture that shapes the experience. Arches, spirals, beams, and portals are among the few elements that inhabit Beatriz Buendia’s paintings, as in the work that illustrates the exhibition invitation (Untitled, 2025). Among the various symbolic meanings that can be established, these elements point toward opportunities and possibilities of crossing, passage, and direction. They thus evoke the sensation of the first dive and of other sensorially immersive experiences that, although momentary, echo across the vastness of time, shortening its distances. Similarly, many of the gestures and brushstrokes present in Buendia’s paintings enter the canvas from its margins, from the outside in, literally approaching the pictorial field. It is as if they constantly reminded us that, when one dives, with respect and desire, for the first time into an unknown sea, one always enters from its edge.