Cecilia Pavón
Curated by Sandra Sanchez
Opening: 8 October 6-9 pm
9 October to 14 November
Cecilia Pavón is a writer, but her literature refuses to stay confined to the page. She extends the territory of the text into objects, turning the gallery into an expanded field of her poetic universe. Her aesthetic is born from the walk, from the everyday, from the fiction of a self that values territory and its possibilities. This is an art that does not yearn for the categories of other latitudes. It works with what is at hand, with the materials and objects that cross her path in the streets of Buenos Aires.
Pavón’s gaze stops with astonishment and affection on the objects sold on the streets of her city. She gravitates toward the ordinary, the unauthored, the so-called “aura-less” things—those mass-produced items that circulate through the global economy without pretension. Mirrors, cheap trinkets, unassuming photographs, everyday utensils. These are not objects of desire in the traditional sense. They are surfaces of inscription, waiting for language, waiting for a story. Pavón approaches them with a tenderness that is neither ironic nor nostalgic. She simply finds them worthy of attention.
Her aesthetic coherence lies precisely in this refusal to aspire. There is no longing for the prestige of international art capitals, no anxiety about material value. The critique of the fetish is radical and grounded: she gives value to use, to the surface that can be written on, to the object that can be activated by language. It is not about what a material should be—whether marble, bronze, or oil on canvas—but about what an object can do when it meets a poem, a thought, or a gesture. In Pavón’s world, value is not inherited. It is performed.
This is a poetics of proximity. Her literary trajectory, from the foundational days of the legendary Belleza y Felicidad gallery to her current projects, has always been rooted in a practice of immediacy. Writing is not a solitary, monumental act; it is a daily conversation with the city, with its streets, its vendors, its forgotten corners. Pavón walks and writes. The city and its cafés become her notebook, its objects become her vocabulary. Her work is a record of encounters that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Her current projects continue in this same spirit. Microcentro de poesía, her latest venture, is a space dedicated to poetic experimentation. It is not a utopia. It is a real place in the heart of the city, where poetry is treated as a vital, breathing practice. Here, joy is not an aspiration. It is a method.
Pavón belongs to a current of Argentine literature that refuses solemnity. She is often grouped with the “poesía de los noventa”, but labels matter little. What defines her is a voice that is at once witty and tender, diaristic and philosophical. She writes about love, money, food, friendship, and the absurdities of daily existence with the same lucid tone. There is no hierarchy in her universe. A plastic rose and a heartbreak hold equal weight.
A Hotel With My Name is an invitation. The exhibition takes its title from Pavón’s first collected poems, published in English in 2015. The hotel is a temporary residence, a place where you check in and out. It is a fiction that Pavón inhabits with humor and grace. The rooms are filled with her objects, her texts, her accumulated debris of the everyday. You are welcome to wander through them, to read the notes left on the nightstand, to sit on the furniture that was never meant to be permanent. This is a gesture of hospitality from a writer who has always believed that poetry belongs to everyone.
Welcome. Make yourself at home. The door is open.
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Cecilia Pavón is a poet, writer, and cultural agitator. She co-founded Belleza y Felicidad (Beauty and Happiness) in Buenos Aires in the late 1990s, an alternative space that became a cornerstone of contemporary Argentine poetry and art. Her work has been translated into English, Portuguese, and French. She currently runs Microcentro, a project dedicated to poetry and experimentation.
Sandra Sánchez is an artist, curator, writer, and editor. Her work is grounded in the practical possibilities of art, collaboration, and listening—practices that critically disrupt the sensory logics of neoliberalism. She is a member of El Cuarto de los Ojos Sucios, a performative space dedicated to the mediation, exhibition, and reflection on contemporary painting, and participates in research groups such as the publishing project Máquina Simple and Ambient para Leer. She is the editor of Onda MX magazine and a professor at La Esmeralda and the Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana. She practices psychoanalytic listening.