‘Heaving with Images’: the Defiant Painting of Sofía Bohtlingk

Argentinian artist Sofía Bohtlingk’s exhibition, ‘Rhythm Is the Best Order’, at the Museo Moderno de Buenos Aires, takes its title from the eponymous 2004 book by Afro-Peruvian writer and choreographer Victoria Santa Cruz, whose seminal poem, ‘Me Gritaron Negra’ (They Yelled at Me: Black, 1978), stands as a foundational text of Afro-diasporic affirmation and resistance. For Santa Cruz, as she observes in the book, rhythm is not merely a structure but a generative force – one that resists subjugation. In her art practice, Bohtlingk meanders through rhythmic patterns that oscillate between structured and unpredictable, as if tracing their own deviations. Through these repeated gestures, her paintings become records of their own making – embodying duration, insistence and transformation on the canvas.

Curated by Victoria Noorthoorn, this exhibition gathers works in which figuration and abstraction coexist in a porous exchange, one that extends beyond individual pieces to shape the exhibition as a whole. A long, wide corridor opens with a large-scale concrete painting (Invisible, 2015), followed by clusters of works on paper (2019–24), many with titles as evocative as the images themselves. Some surrender to the agency of matter: in Untitled (2024), earth and oil converge, fragments of cement dot the surface. Here, material is not a painterly medium but a terrain of negotiation, where eddies of motion are drawn out from the properties of the matter itself.

In another series, movement is embodied through pendular gestures, where the zigzagging completes the space of the page. Works such as The Shame of Desiring Something (2021) and Their Existence Depends on Machines (2022) do not depict movement: they enact it, as if making were a continuous gesture that never fully ceases. Painting, here, is not just an image but also a condition. With a single brush, a single colour and a repeated vertical stroke, a pattern emerges in both You Can Project Whatever You Want on an Abstract Painting, and It Can Become Whatever It Wants to Be (2024) and A Ship in the Indian Ocean (Which Is Brown) When It’s Hot (2024), with opacity and transparency ebbing and flowing in a state of interdependent flux. Here, persistence is a mode of assertion – an ongoing practice. The paintings enact pursuit, a commitment to the unknown and the unspoken, a spiritual discipline of return, of engaging the process in its every nuance.

The third cluster is a selection of ink drawings where a continuous brushstroke ripples across the page, shaping female bodies that seem to surface and dissolve in works such as I’m Not Managing to Empty Myself, It Feels Like I’m Heaving with Images (2024). In some of these works, including My and I (2024) and Seeing the Line, You See It, but It Doesn’t Exist (The Horizon) (2019), abstract movements envelop and traverse figuration, as if setting its contours into motion – pulsing, vibrating, trembling. The figure does not dissolve into abstraction, nor does abstraction yield entirely to figuration; rather, each buoys the other, in an act of sustaining presence. By oscillating between form and formlessness, the figures both emerge and recede.

The tension is tactile: if painting conventionally operates as a site of inscription, then Bohtlingk’s practice unsettles this premise, treating it instead as one of emergence. She pushes painterly matter through sedimentation and erosion; her own hand becoming a river. Brushstrokes pulse, an accretive force resisting closure, closer to the mechanics of breathing. This could be the painterly equivalent of a murmur that refuses to fade, a quiet defiance.

‘Sofía Bohtlingk: Rhythm is the Best Order’ is on view at Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires until 6 April

_{Main image: ‘Sofía Bohtlingk: Rhythm is the Best Order’, 2024–25, exhibition view. Courtesy: Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires; photograph: Josefina Tommasi}