This Saturday, May 23, the Casa Mayor gallery (Capitán Basilio Malutin 263, Asunción) opens El círculo en sí, a solo exhibition by artist Marcos Benítez. The opening, scheduled for 5 p.m., is part of the official program of the 12th edition of Noche de Galerías, an event organized by the Association of Art Galleries of Paraguay (ASGAPA). Admission is free.
Under the curatorship of Damián Cabrera, the exhibition proposes a review of Benítez's trajectory based on the persistence of the circular motif in his production since the 1990s. The archetypal geometric figure functions as a container for environmental, biological, and collective memory concerns, situating the work at the border between the academic traditions of Paraguayan modernism and contemporary expressions of popular or community origin.
The exhibition route includes records of the artist's ephemeral interventions in extreme landscapes, such as actions carried out in the Atacama Desert, where circles of carob leaves were the only organic residue left in a hostile environment. Benítez explains that the guiding concept of the show is to explore the circle as an expanded signifier, and that his creative process has matured over time: “As time passed, I work more on the contents and develop from there. Before, a material called me, and now it's the opposite: I'm interested in a content, a theme, and from there I work on the materiality.”
The thematic selection has direct biographical roots in family memory and traditional ethnobotanical knowledge. The choice of the foundational elements of the work — water and earth — responds to an ethics of conservation assimilated in the artist's environment of origin: “It's something I absorbed, I was nurtured in my family; my mother, for example, was a great connoisseur of medicinal herbs. It's something important to me,” he says.
Noche de Galerías, declared of Cultural and Tourist Interest, simultaneously brings together twenty art spaces in the capital. For the opening night, the organization will provide a free bus system from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m., with specialized guides and monitors trained at local art institutions to facilitate visitor travel.