A certain afternoon, the most beautiful of the afternoons of my life

"A certain afternoon, the most beautiful of the afternoons of my life," is Gabriela Bettini's first retrospective exhibition in Spain and explores a dialectical gaze between Madrid and Buenos Aires from her early works to the present. The starting point is the beginning of an incomplete poem by her grandfather, written at the end of the pages of an Allan Poe book which contains the paradigmatic poem The Raven, where the words "nevermore" resonate again and again. Bettini's work is marked by a history of violence, trauma, and exile that traverses bodies from generation to generation. Her work transfers this genealogy of embodied violence to the landscape, our historical extractivist relationship with nature, and the politics of forgetting towards forms of life that, even so, persevere in their existence. The exhibition shows diverse temporalities that overlap, from colonial paintings by authors such as Frans Post, to scenarios in serious environmental conflict in recent years. In all the works, pictorial representation is evidenced as a trap-craving, accomplice and tool of dispossession and erasure. However, Bettini critically allies with painting to propose reversing this function by showing its mechanism.