THE EDGE OF LANGUAGE
Alianza Francesa de Montevideo

Artist: Magalí Milkis
Curator: Elisa Valerio
Installing & Lighting: Williams Palacios
Visual Communication Design: Micaela Villanueva
Dates: April 23 to May 29, 2026
Place: Bvr. Artigas 1271, Montevideo, Uruguay​

​

This exhibition invites us to delve into the materiality, thought, and unconscious of Magalí Milkis. Through this selection of works, the exhibition seeks to highlight the process of translation that has been intuitively unfolding in Milkis's work for years. This idea, when it enters into dialogue with another format, generates new questions about the creative process itself. In this passage, there is both a loss and a gain of information. Identical translation is impossible: it is within this margin that opens up in the process of translation that Milkis's work emerges.

Her work functions like a rhizome, expanding horizontally and maintaining certain concepts across its multiplicity of forms and incarnations. In the show, pieces made on small sheets of paper coexist with large paintings on canvas. All of them are the fruit of the same quest, which began as a game of connecting the circles of some disused enamel catalogs with lines. At first, lines and adherence to the grid appear, but as the days go by, the artist loosens up, and autonomous forms, phrases, words, and gestures emerge. These sheets gradually become a kind of personal diary in which Milkis leaves traces of her experiences.

In an attempt to return to the canvas, circles appear, in an impossible translation that seeks to reproduce the grid in a new language. Faced with this change in format and scale, the circles become boundaries that order and structure thought, and each one is filled with elements of daily life. The circles become daytime remnants: memory through painting.

​

In Milkis's work, an expressive and intense brushstroke can coexist with a fine and precise line. On the one hand, the line serves as both edge and drawing, sometimes representing separation and boundary, or connection and union. On the other hand, the backgrounds tend to reveal a more pictorial and organic magma, guided by sensitive movement from a conscious practice.

From these figures, two recurring forms emerge: the angle and the circle. The angle appears as a roof, synonymous with home, protection, and refuge, but it also becomes a vagina. The circle, for its part, is egg, womb, shelter, and cave; it is the boundary between inside and outside. These works are presented to us as a code, intimate and private, to be deciphered.