Benito Laren

Argentinean artist Benito Laren’s unusual world is temporarily accessible in the anthological show “Fabularen” (a portmanteau of “Fabulous Laren”). On display at this private museum designed by Uruguayan architect Rafael Viñoly Beceiro, the exhibition , curated by Claudio Ongaro, highlights the output of one of the region’s most eccentric artists. At the margins of the art market—and of everything else—Laren is unclassifiable and truly original.

A rather retro vision of outer space, more informed by 1960s lunar landings than by contemporary space exploration, underscores Laren’s work. And the notion of life on other planets appears throughout delicate pieces in acrylic and collage on glass, a technique that the artist pioneered. Tributes to a range of artists and personalities whom Laren admires coexist in a strange remix, in which formal elements referencing early-twentieth-century Argentinean artist Xul Solar mingle with reproductions of Michael Jackson’s smile.

It’s worth mentioning that Laren himself—a true and tireless performer—importantly figures in his practice. He is the self-proclaimed “king of a one-square-meter country”—an empire he takes with him wherever he goes (mostly by standing somewhere in the city and drawing his territory around him)—and it is not uncommon to spot him in Buenos Aires wearing a Warholian white wig, and black shirt under a white suit “à la Elvis,” as Laren puts it, and golden rings and chains in a nod to Mr. T.

These performative strands augment works in which humor and imagination are as key as the works’ colored paper, painstakingly selected and cut with surgical precision. Bright hues and renderings of space in the contexts of both art and galactic travel—the imaginings of an outer-space world—are the stuff of humor that marks an era. There is none of the post-military-dictatorship grotesquerie that characterized much Argentine art of the 1980s here; astir in these works, rather, are a philosophy of the absurd and a celebration of imagination as freedom typical of the 1990s and 2000s. In other words, they partake of a determination to embrace openness essential to artmaking after the return of democracy.

Translated from Spanish by Jane Brodie.