AN NON-BLACK T-SHIRT is pure dissent in the form of painting. At @piedrasgaleria, Carrie Bencardino (@carriepuzzle) invites us to a parade of looks and gestures that oscillate between pose and confession, between the intimate and the public. Her characters do not inhabit the painting; they shake it up, they disorder it. There is a daily drama, a carefully constructed chaos that filters through every stroke.

Fluidity is the main protagonist: bodies in motion, identities in transition, and a pictorial material that escapes any attempt at containment. The details are never fully defined because what matters here is not what is seen, but what is insinuated. There are secrets hidden in every corner, echoes of counterculture resonating in every pose, in every face, in every almost empty background.

Bencardino immerses us in an underground that does not ask for permission or seek complacency. There is a palpable tension in her works: the theatrical meets the everyday, the decorative flirts with chaos, the mask merges with the face. Is this a scene we see or a story we inhabit? The answer is never direct, because her art, like her characters, refuses to be contained by a single narrative.

In AN NON-BLACK T-SHIRT, boundaries do not exist. Neither between the autobiographical and the collective, nor between the rigid and the fluid. Each work is an invitation —or perhaps a challenge— to think about the place that counterculture occupies in the construction of our identities. A reminder that sometimes, what is not said is what transforms us the most.