Curated by Argentine poet and curator Mariano Mayer, the show consists of 71 works by 48 artists from one of Argentina's most important contemporary art collections, founded by businessman Alec Oxenford. This is the second chapter of a project in three acts that began at MAC Niterói between 2022 and 2023 and will move on to the Iberê Camargo Foundation in Porto Alegre between 2024 and 2025.

When art manages to alchemically combine copy and representation, the results surpass their mimetic condition, achieving products that stand out for their uniqueness and invention. Mariana López, for example, uses painting materials, such as pigments and canvases, to build colored replicas of everyday objects that can visually and spatially supplant the originally represented object. Pictorial representation thus becomes presentation, and art becomes a factory of trompe l’oeil and simulacra. Alfredo Dufour’s works are characterized by a representational fidelity that approximates the universe of cartoons and the reproduction of objects and characters belonging to industrial mass culture. Thus, a chihuahua separated from the world by a muzzle is and is not the nervous and harmless mascot that offers company. The works by Fernanda Laguna and Marcelo Pombo embody an aesthetic program, that of the exhibition room of Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas during the 1990s. Art performs the function of ornamenting everyday objects by means of spurious techniques, such as those employed in handicraft workshops. A work on ornamentation that seeks to once again engage art with beauty. In contrast, Lucrecia Lionti recreates a school chalkboard using textile art. A soft mural, which, through its metonymic relationship with education, symbolically continues to evoke a memory that is as emotional as political. A screen that shows us hazy graphics on its surface with which to exercise a future archaeology, where apparition and disappearance, the recording and blurring of knowledge are combined. Paula Castro, in turn, builds forms from pre-existing matter or situations. In this case, we see a unique and identifiable form inside an industrial object. She corrodes an anodyne plastic surface until it reaches its skeletal shape – the minimal, schematic, essential expression of the object. In some cases, however, the representation can only achieve the thing represented through a narrative or poetic reframing of the object. In such cases, the copy turns into a mutant form. This can be observed in the exhibited work by Fabián Marcaccio, who thematized, across different pieces, the extortive kidnapping of siblings Juan and Jorge Born, heirs of the corporate empire Bunge y Born, around 1975. What we see in this painting-sculpture, or “paintant”, as described by the artist, are the 61 million dollars paid as ransom. A stack of dollars in the process of becoming something else. The sculptures by Diego Bianchi also propose mutant forms, which anthropomorphically re-elaborate the urban imaginaries that the artist discovers in his walks through Buenos Aires. Works that are nourished by the forms and the materials, the detritus and the ways that individuals find of inhabiting the city.