To the holiness of the gambling player it’s called a short book (but you don’t need to write as much when you write like this) of Hector Libertella edited in 2011 to which I now go as a possible oracle because of the randomness of life and art when one is shot like a pinball or pinball this is all about. And so I am reading again that “someday boys will play literature with the echoes of man.” For now, it is about understanding how a mixture of coincidences and misunderstandings made it possible for me to find myself crying on Wednesday, July 6, in the solitude of the converted shed of the Ruth Benzacar gallery (there are those of us who still pass through the closed location in Florida and feel the impulse to go down) on the border of Villa Crespo and Chacarita, the last conquest of the gentrified homeland. It had all started in a café at the Belgrano R station where the essayist Grace Hope remembered that Fabio Kacero, one of his favorite artists, had said something like “bad contemporary art was borderline jokey”. On a foggy British morning and a free schedule, I let a joyful inertia get me on a train imagining the landscape of the Delta under that (not) tremendous sun. But I chose the wrong tokens and I was returned to the Dorrego station of Subway B and there I remembered the words of Speranza and the closeness of Ruth Benzacar where Fabio Kacero exhibits until August 27 “Champion of Ghosts”, one of the most unpredictable samples of 2022. Not disruptive, not disturbing, not disturbing. Unpredictable.

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We could think that this monotonous and endless series of white squares is a very curious form of self-portrait. Something like this had been done by Elmgreen & Dragset (a Danish-Norwegian duo, very Jorge Luis Borgen) when they presented their self-portrait displaying Italian marble plaques bearing the names of their all-time favorite works. Kacero, like Greco, signs artists. And more: converts the signature of artists (living, dead, contemporary, classical) into form and reproduces it with the exactness of a pirate calligrapher. A Salada of the artist’s signature that also signs with its own. The signature in the white void as the synthesis of the character and ghost of the artist, whether it was Molina Campos, Benito Laren, Osamu Tezuka, Yoko Ono or Raúl Soldi among the 182 names of men and women that make up what George Dickie had called “The circle Of art”. Since I tend to skip past the texts to dive into the works (in the same way that I tend to avoid guided tours), I didn’t notice the list of names. I looked for Berni but I couldn’t find him and, without looking for her, the signature of Berni appeared on the wall that faces the entrance gate. Rosario Blefari whose Whatsapp messages are still hosted on my phone. Because in the digital replica of the world no one dies completely. There Facebook profiles, Twitter or Instagram accounts wander in the cyberlimbo. The unexpected embraced me with the same gaseous materiality of the fog of the day and I remained absorbed reading his name and hearing his voice again (singing or speaking) on ​​the hi-fi that plays at maximum volume in mental silence. And I cried for her, of course, still so soon.

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But what was said. He had come to Kacero’s sample without a plan (or because of a plan that exceeded me); without knowing that Rosario Bléfari’s signature was part of his forger-author repertoire and, much less, without having any idea that on that foggy day in which, if the dice had coincided, he would have been in Tigre looking at the superimposition of the fog and the river two years had passed since his death in La Pampa. I learned that later, when I uploaded the photos to IG and the reactions made me fall into the sanctity of the gambling player.

*****

That Wednesday night, July 6, I fell asleep reading the Anthology of the Argentine Dream (Mansalva, 2021) a book of stories written by Fabio Kacero where unpredictability rules as much as in the show. The characters may be Libertella’s holy gamblers, indeterminate forms thrown into dreamlike nonsense. On page 22 I read: “(…) Then, letting myself be carried away by the emotion of pleasant memories, I recite the lines of a poem written by a poet from that city that says: It seems to me that Bariloche began / I consider it as eternal as day and night”. Not two seconds go by until I remember that the singer of Suárez, the writer, the artist, the signature made by Kacero, spent her childhood in the mecca of student tourism. And I rewrite that imaginary village poet, in the air: “It seems to me that Rosario began / I judge it as eternal as day and night”.

There is no rhyme, but signature.