Plantas de los Dioses: Florencia Bohtlingk

The record of what she sees and lives marks the pulse of Florencia Bohtlingk’s work in an arc that embraces landscape, everyday life and militancy. Between what surprises her, moves her or simply accompanies her and the surface of the paper or canvas, the artist introduces the question of the forms and colors of experience. The challenges of technique are offered to the viewer in order to state that painting is a physical and thought process.

 

Bohtlingk constantly draws and sketches: her production maintains the vibration of the immediate. The influx of images in her practice feeds a profuse body of work that, although crossed by diverse themes, appears cohesive. The contemporary dimension is exercised in an active recognition of multiple pictorial traditions, among them, Amazonian painting, Torregarciano’s constructivism and the social muralism of the sixties.

In her earliest stages Bohtlingk develops works linked to local identifications with surrealism. Later, she deploys numerous watercolors and oil paintings that deal with the ecosystemic unity around the La Plata and Amazon rivers and that are inscribed in that tradition of the landscape genre that, in Argentina, was resistant to the academic and modern models of representation of the environment. Bohtlingk’s paintings show the beauty and savagery of the jungle and the coast and, at the same time, the survival of colonial structures in the extractivist models and the superimposition of cultural, ethnic and religious forms in the frontier territories.

The inscription of the human in nature is also thematized in her audiovisual production, where the dimension of speech is introduced in connection with her most recent pictorial series. In the latter, the artist paints the words that surround her in order to construct and give an account of the sonorous and semantic landscapes that manifest themselves in the missionary bush or in the streets inhabited by the current social movements.