The damn spring goes swiftly... says part of the chorus of a song that laments among other things, the years gone, the lost loves. Not so fast are those times perceived for those who go through the experience; the thing is that adolescence is usually accompanied by natural anguish and embarrassment to a period that marks the end of childhood, the onset of puberty and the conflictive beginning of adulthood, a time of growing uncertainties.

In these works of authorship, the theme has not been developed in a specific manner but has been produced through the realization of different series. As a neutral observer, no text is necessary to point out once again what happens to the productions of Adriana Lestido and Juan Travnik; both move away from artificially constructed situations recorded as a photographic reality and explore the camera as an extension of their ways of looking, based rather on an analytical orientation towards what they observe. They have shaped, in spite of their discursive differences, critical and visual baggage that share the modality of somehow reversing the spectator's point of view, making the observer become observed. These particular visions about adolescence are not excepted, in which the images interpellate, question, leave no room for the possibility of indifference, frontal proposals in which we feel induced to confront the subject and give rise to the reflection.

In Lestido it is not a novelty a persuasive and dramatic language with which she simultaneously exhibits a deeply seductive materialism. Dramatic but spectacular in their forcefulness, some of her images project a somber fascination, while others express themselves as defining the desire for reaffirmation, so common in that stage of estrangement from childhood. As characters they appear to stand, exuding the need to validate their identities, a beautiful record of self-flattery as a fiction of control and power, and another successful representation of something that could not possibly be apprehended or photographed. Perhaps Lestido will reach these instances by hes discreet way of pursuing them, interacting in the scene in a silent way, becoming what looks at hes desire, if possible imperceptible. A signaling work to find the tone, the voice, in the quest to merge with what happens in the scene or the characters she chooses, some of troubled beauty.

Travnik shows a set of varied and exquisite portraits in which many of the peculiarities of the damn spring are seen. In tune with his personal vision and recognized ability to capture subtleties and complexities, the characters are exhibited very personal, intense and particular. A pubescent who exhibits his torso with obvious shame, a sketchy smile, many freckles on someone facing the lens of the eye, or the leading role in a young girl's eye care trace of the eyeliner are just some of the details that make it minimal elements become of a sometimes disconcerting importance in careful shots that show their acute visual sensitivity. His interest in drawing and painting is no coincidence; minute and frontal, always limpid and effective, his forceful images have become identifiers of a poetics of truthfulness.

Lucidity is a gift and a punishment
quotes Lestido in one of her books to the poet Alejandra Pizarnik.

And it is timely in relation to both of them. Bonded through an old friendship, beyond the reasons and the experiences and with their differences, they have made a distinctive seal of the approach of fusing the aesthetic with a documentary orientation, even sometimes without a conscious intentionality. The owners of an unusual and powerful body of work that precedes them and points out as iconic references in their work, it is celebratory the opportunity to share in a joint exhibition the ever particular vision of these contemporary artists frequently referred to as masters from their extensive authorial works. In them they show that the personal and the social are necessarily intertwined, a signaling to our own time.

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