“White underwear discarded on the floor, the action fixed in wet pools of resin, while tangled thongs pinned to the wall mimic service markings on a tennis court or echo religious iconography. A new body of work from Isabella Benshimol Toro, ‘Papicolostrum Intolerance Club’, recalls memories of going to play tennis with her father as a precocious young girl of nine or ten. For Benshimol Toro, tennis, with its implicit structure of boundaries and power, mirrors the relationship between father and daughter and its inherent complexity, a relationship that has come to have the mainstream moniker ‘daddy issues’.
The individual titles of the works, ‘Soft Serve Lob’; ‘Butter Swing, Topspin Teeth’, reference their post-match ritual of ice cream—a reward, while the title of the series ‘Papicolostrum Intolerance Club’, is a gently teasing word play: papi—the affectionate term for father in the artist’s native Venezuela; colostrum is the first milk that mothers produce after giving birth, the colour and texture of butter. The sculptures in the show are elated and exhausted in their wetness, the fixed gesture also a desire to freeze that moment: ice cream melts but Papicolostrum Intolerance Club is 4eva.” Text by Rose Easton