A Body of Friendship
Studio Showroom · NoMad, New York
The Slip presents A Body of Friendship, a studio showroom in NoMad, New York, bringing together recent work by Syd Krochmalny with works by Manuela Viera-Gallo, Jake Scharbach, DETEXT, Pedro Wainer, and Claudia Kaatziza Cortínez.
The exhibition takes its point of departure from Tecnologías de la amistad, the banquet Krochmalny organized with Roberto Jacoby at Periférica in 2006. That event treated friendship not as a private sentiment but as a social technology: a way of assembling people, exchanging ideas, and producing the conditions for art to occur. The present showroom extends that proposition through artists whose practices have developed alongside sustained personal and intellectual exchanges. The works are not gathered to illustrate friendship. Together, they give friendship a provisional body.
Krochmalny’s Transecular Abstraction stages a world in which geometry has become flesh and flesh has become architecture. Geometric structures, hybrid bodies, vegetal forms, suns, moons, and serpentine figures occupy a common pictorial field. Erotic and sacred, hard and soft, masculine, feminine, and nonbinary forms coexist without resolving into a stable order. Bodies touch, merge, and mutate. Rather than offering fixed identities, the paintings render identity as a continuous process of transformation. Krochmalny thus proposes a corporeal materialism that opens a path to mystical transcendence through the body and its transformations.
In one room, painting refuses to remain still. The works extend into animation and music, accompanied by songs whose lyrics take their cues from the titles of the paintings. Image, language, sound, and duration fold into one another, allowing the pictorial world to behave like a score, a scene, or a body in motion.
In another room, DETEXT’s Spam (Song) (2011) turns unsolicited emails advertising Viagra and penis enlargement into a pop song. It takes the language of spam—its promises of potency, enlargement, and desirability—and makes it sing. Beneath its absurdity is a precise account of how masculinity is manufactured, circulated, and sold.
The invited works extend this movement between bodies, images, histories, and materials. Manuela Viera-Gallo’s paintings and objects move through fragmented figures, masks, animals, and unstable identities. Jake Scharbach recombines historical portraiture, classical imagery, consumer packaging, and popular culture, treating cultural memory as something to be dismantled and recomposed. Pedro Wainer’s Lo que vendrá (2025) reconstructs industrial machinery through cut and layered photographic reliefs, making the image operate as a built object. Claudia Kaatziza Cortínez transforms stairs, architectural structures, and piano-like forms into a framed composition organized by repetition, interval, and the suggestion of latent sound.
A showroom is ordinarily a place where objects are arranged for viewing and acquisition. Here, it becomes a social and material apparatus: a place where images, artists, histories, and audiences are brought into contact. The exhibition is not a neutral container for finished works but a temporary body assembled through relations. Friendship is not its theme or illustration. It is the form this body takes.