Necesité Personas a project by Ángela Ferrari

Saenger Galería presents in it's Project Room the exhibition "Neceisté Personas", which takes place from the premise that creation is not a solitary act, but a practice that requires others in order to find meaning. Argentine artist Ángela Ferrari (1990), who has been based in Mexico since 2018, proposes a project that challenges the isolation of the studio and the romanticized figure of the lone artist, instead placing shared making, emotional choices, and the frictions between diverse practices at the leading edge.

Ferrari defines her work as a “grotesque-passionate baroque,” a world populated by intense scenes where the vegetation, the animal, and humans coexist in extreme tension—rubbing, biting, tearing, fragility. Her paintings and drawings evoke 19th-century hunting tapestries forgotten in decaying mansions, where every gesture—whether delicate or brutal—tests the line between hunter and prey. This exploration of the blurred boundary between nature and culture, impulse and representation, extends in "Necesité personas" into a collective terrain, where Ferrari invites nine other artists to engage in dialogue through reactions and resonances.

The exhibition arises from a context marked by migration and uprooting. Ferrari arrived in Mexico during a time of social crisis in Argentina and has since conceived of her artistic practice as a form of personal agency in the face of precarity and closed (global and personal) borders. This project also embodies a gesture of gratitude toward both Mexico and Argentina, an acknowledgment of the territories, affections, and imaginaries that have welcomed and transformed her. In the artist’s words: "I live in this world, and I never forget it is a shared one; that’s why inviting others into this exercise enriches it and it enriches me. This approach is my way of generating, together and in company, other forms of relating through generosity, difference, and affection."

"Necesité personas" as a result, devolps through two modes of working: reaction/responding in resonance with another artist’s work—and resonance/absorbing, extending, and expanding another’s gesture within one’s own creative process. In both cases, the encounter is central. The exhibition draws a space of interculturality where the common and the different recognize each other: a rehearsal of community through sensitive knowledge.

The material chosen by each artist reinforce this will toward hybridity and dialogue. The ceramics of Imanol Castro (Mexico, 1991) intertwine with the paper experiments of Luciana Lubreto (Argentina, 1977); the anthropomorphic and botanical graphite drawings of Florencia Rodríguez Giles (Argentina, 1978) and Samuel Lasso (Colombia, 1991) echo the natural resins and waxes used by Maggot Mushh (England, 1991); María Laura González (Argentina, 1989) introduces biomaterials made from onion and artichoke in tension with Mauricio Orduña’s (Mexico, 1982) use of industrial resin and copper leaf. Meanwhile, Edgar García Ruiz (Mexico, 1987) uses metal plates coated in oil paint to push the boundaries between drawing, painting, and object—aligning with the practices of Ángela Ferrari (Argentina 1990) and Guido Contrafatti (Argentina, 1987). Together, these materials form a rich landscape where the manual, the experimental, and the precarious displace the notion of industrial production, highlighting error, fragility, and gesture as critical forces against a disconnected and monotonous art system.

The themes that emerge within this weave are varied: from the flora and fauna of Mexico and Argentina—where birds like the hummingbird interrupt the dominant Western imaginaries of art history—to reflections on bodies in agony, decomposition, and transformation. The project in that way proposes a resistance to hegemonic narratives, creating space for alternative memories and genealogies.

In it's background, "Necesité Personas" also questions the dynamics of artistic education and labor. Ferrari, who has worked both as a teacher and as an assistant to other artists, here challenges the traditional academic model that views creation as an individual process, closed off from the collective. On the contrary, this exhibition proposes to hybridize teaching with production, the professional with the everyday, craft with leisure. Pulsing within this hybridity is a critique of the capitalist paradigm of productivity and individual success, advocating instead for a shared mode of making that values the human over market logic.

As a result, "Necesité Personas" is not just a gathering of artworks, but a space of reciprocity where the common is produced and sustained in the relationships that each piece builds with another and with those who observe them. A political and emotional gesture that reminds us that every artistic practice, even the most intimate, always needs others in order to exist. Or, as Ángela Ferrari puts it: "To understand each other through difference and through what we share."

This exhibition is curated in collaboration between Ángela Ferrari and Christian Barragán