Guillermo Forchino, Noi, I Grotteschi (We, The Grotesques), exhibition at Galerie Joseph, Paris

Me ne frego is an Italian expression meaning ‘I don’t give a damn’ that found its way into Argentine usage. Its characters, oblivious to the ecological disaster unfolding around them, form a biting allegory of a humanity hurtling towards ecocide.

Forchino turns his characters into players in an everyday ‘Divine Comedy’. The scenes are so familiar that they make us smile, yet they also hold up a mirror to our own contradictions.

A blind gaze is a choice about what we are willing to see and acknowledge. Old age, illness, death and the wounds of the past are among the realities that society would rather not look at.

There are no characters here, only objects mutilated by the chainsaw, a symbol of budget cuts taken to their most brutal extreme.

Inspired by visits to psychiatric hospitals in Rosario, these figures evoke the confinement, isolation and institutional violence endured by those whom society pushes to the margins, revealing the human cost of exclusion and neglect.