Isabella Benshimol Toro repurposes domestic items and clothing, which she embeds in materials such as epoxy resin and silicone to create sculptures and installations. This process freezes in time fleeting gestures and ephemeral actions, rituals and sensations of everyday life, the body removed and indexical. In this way, the artist invites viewers to reflect on the intimacy, the mundane minutia and the temporality of the quotidian. For NEVEN, Benshimol Toro sourced stainless steel bathroom towel rails, on which underwear and other clothing items, petrified in resin, are draped – perhaps discarded before a shower; after a drenching from rain; in the act of undressing for a lover; following a laundry cycle. Despite variations between the works, the hang leans into a visual language of repetitiveness, underscoring the ritualism of domestic routine.

The show expands on Benshimol Toro’s interest in the history of painting, specifically the legacy of geometric abstraction, which emerged in avant-garde movements in 1960s Venezuela. In his Coloritmo paintings, Alejandro Otero depicted musical rhythm and temporality in colour, with abstraction used as an instrument of order and purity. Benshimol Toro both references and disorders: the rhythm is fractured and referential, contaminated by personal time, personal mess, and the whims of volatile materials. The title Scatter Symphony foregrounds this tension between harmony and chaos, order and mess, the formal composition of a symphony, and the tempo of disruption and recalibration within defines everyday gestures and is integral to the practice itself. “Symphony” is a metaphor for both planned orchestration and sensory layering of elements; here, colour, line, and temporal rhythms drip off chrome rails that themselves evoke the staff and barlines in sheet music. The dry, geometric, and restrained readymade elements are encroached on by those that are wet, abject, and unruly. Repurposing the formal aspects of the readymade objects and clothing items she selects, her work creates at once abstracted minimalist compositions of line, colour and material, and figurative portraits of “in-between” moments in time.

In this exhibition, for the first time, Benshimol Toro encases her still life compositions in plexiglass boxes. The boxes act as containers for preservation and elevation – interests at the core of the artist’s practice–, museological apparatuses of conservation and display which sustain artefacts in a fixed temporal condition and state, offering them up as objects of contemplation and study. The barrier created by the plexiglass removes the objects from everyday contexts. They become products, fossils, artefacts, treasures; something other and untouchable, separate, abstracted intimacies. Inspired by the vitrine-like window of the gallery,

Benshimol Toro envisioned the gallery space as reminiscent of a shop or showroom, in which domestic items are displayed for sale; mass-produced wares which, through acquisition and subsequent daily use, are alchemically elevated to personal belongings. Somewhere between showroom, symphonic arrangement, archaeological museum and domestic tableaux, Benshimol Toro’s work negotiates notions of temporality, proximity, distance, intimacy and fetishisation, the scenes that she composes activated and awakened by the viewer’s movement past and through them.