Curatorial text by Dr. Alban Martinez Gueyraud (Exhibition: The skin, the body of art, 2022)
The skin: the body of art
Indigenous, popular and urban art in Paraguay
"The deepest thing in man, as he knows, is the skin."
Paul Valéry . The Fixed Idea (1931) .
«In short, it will be understood that the painting (canvas, fabric) is not a surface, as is not the color, the skin or that “laminated” principle of the visible [...] The painting is in itself a structure of the fold, of the interstice.»
Georges Didi-Huberman . The Embodied Painting (1984).
The Matices Gallery (Asunción) presents the exhibition La piel: el cuerpo del arte . This exhibition, curated by Alban Martínez Gueyraud and Osvaldo Salerno, brings together various creations made in Paraguay between 2015 and 2022, expressed in different languages and contexts: indigenous art, popular art, architecture and urban art with an illustrated root. The works presented were selected taking as a starting point the concept of “skin”, as well as the metaphors, analogies, signs and symbols that emerge from it.
The skin is the largest organ of the human body; it is the medium that connects the inside with the outside. This membrane-texture retains, protects, communicates, repels, senses and regulates both the balance of the organism and the connection configured between its different systems. As a threshold of sensations, it functions as a thermoregulator of body temperatures in correspondence with that of the world. The skin can perceive a caress, shudder, hurt, turn purple. It also acts as a border full of sensitivity; it filters relationships and transmits messages, embodying a representative symbolic space from which the memory and identity of the subject with its context is constructed/reconstructed.
Starting from the skin, this collective exhibition explores our cultural and ethnic diversity. Open, plural and contemporary, it allows us to investigate the particularities of the proposals, while encouraging us to look beyond the artistic object. Linked to the body of art and architecture and considered “on stage” as it occupies a significant space in the world, each work invites a look from different perspectives, which allows it to connect, communicate and correspond with the other works that make up the presentation.
The exhibition space is structured around three thematic axes: Body, Membrane, Metaphors. These axes converse, intersect and, at times, fit together. By expanding and exchanging the relationships, the bias is promoted that said space acts, as a territory, in an expanded way. That is to say, that it both inhabits us and is inhabited.
BODY
«To name himself, to affirm himself, man points out himself. He emphasizes his body, reshapes it using key lines and points, underlining invisible aspects. The body is the seat of the first identity; the identity of the individual, the clan or the group; that of the entire human race that reinvents its contour in order to occupy a place in its own world. The body is the place of the ritual, the very scene where timeless time begins and ends. For this reason, the indigenous person uses the privileged support of his cultural expression: he paints it and tattoos it; he covers it with feathers, necklaces, beads, impressive skins and beautiful fabrics; he conceals it and removes it; he detaches it from the natural world and reintegrates it, different; in it he reconciles the individual and the social, the biological and the cultural, the ethical and the beautiful.»
Ticio Escobar . The Beauty of Others (2012, 2nd ed.).
«The incarnate would therefore be another ghost, the colour in action and in transit. A braid between the surface and the depth of the body, a braid of white and blood.»
Georges Didi-Huberman . The Embodied Painting (1984).
The skin is a metonym for the body, which it envelops, constituting a border and point of contact between interior and exterior life. Life is sheltered behind the skin, which defends it from the outside. In its thickness, a transition and a change of characteristics occur as we travel-become. The internal cells are vital organs; they are alive inside the body; on the other hand, the external cells could be alive-dead, since they are already from the outside: the world. The nature of the skin is such that it exists simultaneously as a dead organ and a living organ; for this reason it forms at the same time the outside and the inside of the body.
The body – covered in skin – occupies a prominent place in contemporary art (as in other disciplines such as anthropology, sociology or architecture); it is both the site of symbolic representation and cultural construction and the realm of perception and action, experience and reflection.
On the one hand, this axis has brought together works in which the body (both human and animal) acts as an object and model of inspiration, and others in which the body is found within community experiences, immersed in the symbolic universe of images in which it intervenes as a mediator of social, economic, environmental, cultural, linguistic and religious processes. On the other hand, considering Didi-Huberman’s discourse in La pintura embodiada , which manages to “braid” the terms canvas-surface-skin and paint-body, we can relate such concepts to the approach of other works gathered in this axis of the exhibition, in which the ideas of pictorial flesh and skin, the visuality of the humanized painting and the intemperance of certain paintings are articulated.
This axis includes pieces of anthropomorphic ceramics by Ediltrudis Noguera (Tobatí); rosewood carvings by Francisco, Ignacio and Agustino Artur (Nivaklé community, Paraguayan Chaco); paintings by Alfonso Benítez (Nivaklé) based on landscapes around the Pilcomayo River (Fischat community – Laguna Escalante); drawings by Osvaldo Pitoé (Guarani) referring to scenes of collective life in the Chaco; tattooed bodies photographed by Alfredo Quiróz (Asunción); and paintings by Anna Scavone (Asunción) that have organs and internal body structures as their theme.
MEMBRANE
«The skin has a potential vital energy that is superficial. And just as events do not occupy the surface, but appear on it, surface energy is not located on the surface, but is linked to its formation and reformation.»
Gilles Deleuze . Logic of Sense (1988) .
«If, as McLuhan said, both clothing and architecture are extensions of our skin, functioning as a mechanism of energy control against the outside world, their function as a membrane would certainly be very important [...] Architecture should not be a thick, rigid wall, but a flexible epidermis, like our skin, that allows us to exchange information with the outside world. Architecture configured with this membrane should perhaps be called a “media suit”. Architecture is an extension of clothing and therefore a media suit.»
Toyo Ito . Tarzan in the Media Forest (1997).
The skin is a complex membrane that separates worlds. But this skin does not only depend on the interior; the exterior also shapes it, models it and leaves traces on it. This simultaneous belonging to two different worlds, intrinsic to every border, gives it form and character. The skin contains and detains; therefore, it receives and supports, it marks and expresses itself in its texture.
Behind the folds and trappings of the skin there is another element that contains us: our “second skin”. We can think that clothing, the environment, the architectural fact, the city, are a kind of succession of membranes that human beings take or design to their measure, within their contingencies of choice; this succession ends up forming part of our world. As occurs in art and architecture, what is on the other side of the membrane becomes as significant as what remains on this side.
In this context, the quality of membrane as an integumentary system can be read analogically in certain works here present: the Chaco caraguatá weavings (manjui, nivaklé and ayoreo), the basketry and fiber frameworks of the Mbya Guaraní community (Caaguazú ), the musical instruments of Delfín Penayo (mbya guaraní); the object piece by Carlo Spatuzza (Asunción), made up of an organic animal fiber (cast and waterproofed).
Meanwhile, different marks from (and on) the skin can be seen in the impressions of real bodies by Osvaldo Salerno (Asunción); the leather impressions by Carlo Spatuzza (Asunción); the impressions of bark from living trees by Marcos Benítez (Asunción). Traces and external signs can also be seen in the sgraffito on the ceramics of the Scarificatio series by Jorge Enciso (Asunción); in the pyrographed wood sculptures by Emilio Duarte and Vicente Piragi (Aché, Ypetemí – Caazapá) and in those by Emiliano Tãkuangi and Felipe Krajadagi (Aché, Puerto Barra – Naranjal). Likewise, recalling the words of Toyo Ito, there are images of certain architectural works by José Cubilla (Asunción).
METAPHORS
"Just as the bones, muscles, entrails and blood vessels are covered with a skin that makes the appearance of man bearable, so the emotions and passions of the soul are wrapped in vanity, the skin of the soul."
Friedrich Nietzsche . Human, All Too Human (1878).
In all cultures and throughout history, there are many possible associations based on the skin and its symbolism. As a connecting organ between the subject and the world, the skin suggests a multiplicity of adaptation and exchange strategies between a body and a context, both of which are always changing. Our relationship with the world is therefore through the skin and its specialized areas: those that cover the annex structures, the body orifices and those related to the senses.
Likewise, the skin, as a reflection of physical and mental health, transmits both positive and negative emotions. We express our emotional-mood state through the skin: we blush, we turn pale, we feel chills, we emanate pheromones, our hair stands on end. Sometimes we use it as a reference to indicate connection (“a matter of skin”) or empathy (“putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes”). We can assume that our mind imagines the world based on the story transmitted by the skin and that we establish contact with the world through the data provided by it.
In indigenous communities, animal skins and feathers are used in the symbolic context of different ceremonies, experiences and rituals linked to culture. For example, in the Ayoreo culture, an ayoi crown (made of feline skin) means for the hunter-warrior who wears it access to instinctive knowledge and the powers of the animal, as well as recognition of his bravery. In this context, in The Beauty of Others , Ticio Escobar argues that the forms and expressions of indigenous culture are incorporated into the socio-ethnic order and consolidate the main religious, social and economic functions.
Thus, metaphors arising from certain particularities of the skin and projected into rituals and artistic and linguistic expressions become images (tactile, visual) that can be translated into messages open to conceptual associations and different interpretations depending on the context, the cultural codes and the gaze projected onto them.
In this axis, ceramics by Julia Isídrez (Itá) are presented; paintings (in colored pencils and markers) by Ogwa (†) and pen drawings by Fredy Flores, Deisy Falcón, Doriana Falcón, Guillermina Rodas and Clemente Juliuz (†) (Paraguayan Chaco); photographs from the Arete Guazu series by Javier Medina Verdolini (Asunción). Also present is the ayoi crown in feline skin and bird feathers (ayoreo).
Alban Martinez Gueyraud
Asuncion, April 2022
