ArtNoble Gallery is pleased to present Un secreto se apaga entre mis manos (A secret is revealed in my hands), a solo exhibition by Amparo Viau (Adrogué, Argentina, 1991), with a critical text by Benedetta Casini.
Born in Adrogué, in the province of Buenos Aires, Viau studied Visual Arts at the Uni- versidad Nacional de las Artes and film directing at CIEVYC in Buenos Aires. In recent years her work has rapidly gained recognition within the Argentine art scene, with solo exhibitions and participation in institutional projects including Fundación PROA, as well as winning the Premio a la Obra de Arte at arteBA 2022.
For her first European presentation, Viau conceives a large-scale installation, an immersive path in which a single drawing, approximately thirty-five meters long and made with chalk pastels on paper, unfolds through the space, transforming drawing into a physical, visual, and temporal experience. The image ceases to function as an isolated element and instead becomes an environment, a passage, and a gesture.
At the center of Viau’s research lies the human figure. Intertwined bodies, overlapping scenes, and narrative fragments construct a layered visual texture in which drawing enters into dialogue with performative languages such as contemporary dance, theater, and cinema. The images appear like suspended choreographies or theatrical still frames crystallized on paper. Each body contains a gesture, a tension, and a rhythm, while each group of figures suggests the possibility of a story unfolding within another.
The installation conceived for Un secreto se apaga entre mis manos unfolds in three moments—beginning, transition, and expansion—which do not follow a linear sequence but rather trace a cyclical movement. An initial zone of tension and density, where bodies intertwi- ne and overlap, gradually gives way to an unstable threshold of formal transformation, eventually opening into a phase of expansion in which color and space seem to dilate and breathe. The narrative does not reach a definitive conclusion; the image remains in a state of continuous reactivation, suggesting a circular and processual sense of time.
Chalk, a fragile and powdery material, reinforces the performative dimension of the work. The mark preserves the intensity of the gesture while at the same time revealing its vulne- rability, allowing the ephemeral—almost impermanent—nature of the image to emerge.
Un secreto se apaga entre mis manos thus takes shape as a space of passage in which drawing becomes a stage and time manifests as cycle, transformation, and return, inviting the viewer into an immersive experience where gesture, space, and narrative intertwine in a visual and sensory continuum.
AMPARO VIAU
Born in 1991 in Adrogué, Argentina.
Lives and works Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Amparo Viau’s work combines gestural intensity, eroticism, and mythical narrative through large-scale drawings and installations. Using pastels and chalk on paper, and also working on perforated wood, Viau constructs scenes in which bodies, hybrid figures, and archetypal symbols intertwine in narratives that address desire, memory, and identity from a deeply Latin American perspective.
Her images offer a kind of carnal odyssey, an emotional and political map traversed by duality, love and hate, surrealism and the dreamlike. There are always kisses, encounters, gestures that verge on the romantic and the tragic. Bodies look at one another, mingle, and merge in an overflowing sensuality, as if the paper itself were not enough to contain them.
Viau’s works tell stories: personal, communal, and cultural experiences that inhabit the artist at every moment. They function as metaphors of time and of the human condition, where past, present, and future overlap in a montage of disparate temporalities that connect and address one another.
Her practice unfolds as an exercise in poetic and critical revision of the collective body, proposing new mythologies in which the intimate and the political intersect. In this context, her sculptural work in wood appears as a natural extension of drawing: the lines acquire volume, the bodies rise from the paper and assert themselves in space, evoking the intensity of the live model and the shared gesture. Amparo Viau graduated in Visual Arts from the Universidad Nacional de Arte (UNA) in Buenos Aires in 2012. She later obtained a degree in Film Directing in 2017 from CIEVYC–Centro de Investigación y Experimentación en Video y Cine in Buenos Aires. Her works have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions including Feira Material, Mexico (2026); Galería Grasa, Argentina (2025, 2023); Museo Fortabat, Argentina (2025); KUNT Espacio Contemporáneo, Argentina (2024); Fundación PROA, Argentina (2023); Alliance Française, Argentina (2023); Tomás Redrado Art, Miami (2022); and Munar Arte, Argentina (2021).
