By Josefina Marcuzzi
The central sculpture, titled the same as the exhibition, presents an installation of almost five meters by two and a half meters, which houses figures cut out of classical statues and life models. The work reflects on classical beauty and artistic creation, challenging the dichotomy between being worshipped (as a deity) and being loved (being humanly wanted).
In a video call with Télam, the artist delves into the creative and personal process that is synthesized in this exhibition.
—Télam: “Bad Posture” is an exhibition that connects, or combines, collage with queerness. How do you explain this relationship?
—Luciana Pinchiero: This is something I’ve been discussing with other queer artists for a while now. Obviously, it’s not a concept I invented. Collage is not the most popular artistic medium, obviously, but it has this thing about building from an image that already exists, that is given and determined. It is broken down, combined, and a new visual discourse is created. I think about this in relation to my heterosexual life in the past: so much that is taken for granted, that is given and served up for heteronormativity, and suddenly, being queer, you take from that institutionalized material, because it’s what’s available, and you create your own idea of identity, of who you are and where you belong. Your own narrative and your own truth.
Collage intrinsically encompasses issues and politics of authorship, because it takes visual references from another person and creates its own language. With painting it is different because it comes from a place of zero imagination; when you use images that already exist you adapt to that. So queer is a personal cry but also, inevitably, one of adapting to what is predetermined in society. This can be seen in the history of collage, which is not well known, which is more closely linked to German surrealism. There is a lot in that work that for me is a cry of ‘I need my own identity, but I have all these elements that determine a lot of things for me’.