The Unburying of the Devil, curated by Carlos Gutiérrez, stems from the recognition of a possible crisis of imagination, driven by political instability and the rise of a type of thinking that tends to erode interpersonal connections. Primarily composed of paintings, the exhibition aims to transform the gallery into a hybrid space: part bar, part cinema, part club. The paintings operate in a similar way, depicting situations that could take place anywhere—real or imaginary. For Bencardino, the urgency lies in generating new tools to build alternative worlds.
Bencardino’s work draws on images found in books, magazines, album covers, music videos, the internet, and her personal archive of objects and other materials circulating within mass culture and its platforms. Her references stem from a highly distinctive affective imaginary: the aesthetics of queer communities and the adolescences of her generation, the visual codes of countercultural scenes (such as punk and various subgenres of metal), comics and illustration (including Ciruelo, Victoria Francés, Luis Royo, Boris Vallejo, and Magalí Villeneuve), and the fantastic literary imaginary (particularly William Blake and J.R.R. Tolkien), among many others. Bencardino digitally processes and distorts these images, using the resulting transformations as the basis for her paintings.
Bencardino works from a critical stance on the circulation and reappropriation of images in the contemporary era, where sources and visual references multiply, intermingle, and undergo constant transformation. In her painting, appropriation is not an end in itself but a means of questioning cultural memory, shared iconographies, and the affective relationships we establish with images.
The exhibition also features a video piece—a monologue reflecting on the influence of various artists, surrealism, and magical thinking in shaping Bencardino’s imagination. The show highlights the connections between imagination—or more precisely, the capacity to imagine—and politics, engaging with the production of images and recovering past traces that may help challenge totalizing narratives of the collective story. This project, then, seeks to reclaim spaces where shared ideas and the desire for a common horizon have not yet been fully exhausted.
