From Me to You
Installation view of the series From Me to You, exhibited at Symbiosis.
Lately, I've developed an interest in sexting. It's something I only started practicing relatively recently. For “Deseos Voraces”, together with Luna and Juli, we used "desire" as our common ground. You can read more about it in the curatorial text that Maca wrote for the exhibition. And since sexting has made me feel very desired, it seemed like a wonderful opportunity to create artwork around it. What would happen to me — and I’m sure to many others as well — is that the nudes I sent seemed so beautiful to me that it almost made me sad I couldn’t share them openly. In fact, I believe they have that kind of beauty precisely because they are embedded in the context of sexting. I took those nudes I had once sent and translated them into drawings. Drawing became a kind of filter, choosing what parts to preserve and what parts to let go of. There’s a subtlety that pencil gives me that I haven’t been able to find in other materials. (Ugh, and especially on raw canvas!). Now, I realize that when removed from their original context, they lost some of their power. So I felt the need to emphasize the “end goal” of the nude — its purpose, its reason for being: to make us come. Personally, I really enjoy watching the other person climax. The face a man makes when he comes is such a fragile, vulnerable expression — so… I don’t even know — so, so, so, so… I mean, I’m fascinated. If I could, I’d devour that expression. Then I realized it had become an active production of emotions and meanings — where, instead of the body being consumed, the body is re-signified. The desire evoked by these images doesn’t exist to be consumed, but rather to be activated in the receiver. And it is in that receiver where it ultimately transforms. That’s why the title is: From Me to You. So I hardened the canvas, as if it were the tissue or paper used to wipe away semen, sweat, and saliva. And it is this mixture of fluids that signals the “end of the nude.” Likewise, by wrinkling the fabric, I ultimately decide what is revealed and what is not. I finish stretching my body, reconstructing it. It’s a piece that seems soft, but is hard. A body broken apart and exposed. Aren’t we told, for our own safety, to never show our face? In fact, the government published Legislative Decree 1410, which incorporates the crimes of harassment, sexual harassment, sexual blackmail, and the dissemination of images, audiovisual materials or audio recordings with sexual content into the Penal Code, and also modifies the procedure for sanctioning sexual harassment. (gob.pe, 2018) The aim is to establish prison sentences of up to six years for those who distribute sexual content without the victim’s consent In a couple of pieces, I show my face. I wanted them to know whose pieces of exposed body they were, and I needed them to recognize my identity. The exercise of presenting myself in parts took several attempts. Not due to lack of skill, but because of the nerves of exposing myself. Even if they are just drawings, the original material still consists of my nudes. Now, I invite you to get to know me in bits and pieces through the following works.
Voracious Desires
Symbolizing the Act of Wanting
There’s an unsettling shimmer that appears in the work of artists who explore their own bodies. A unique trace—like a signature—governs their pieces, driven by the urgent desire to dismantle the words that have so often condemned their bodies. What they uncover now is that this sexual being has always existed—born from the very first encounter with pleasure—and now belongs entirely to them. It is a carnal and personal pleasure, more theirs than anyone else’s, born of the urgency to use their bodies. To give it use. To take it to the edge and attempt to push it. We see deformed, surrendered, and exposed bodies. What morbid desires can we extract from them? Each artist in this exhibition begins from a shared premise: the intimate documentation of their emotions. Luna Dannon works from desire and fear as dual forces that stretch and pull within her paintings. She gives herself permission to dissect her experience with surgical precision, transforming her self-reflection into an emotional archive. Vanessa Karin, in turn, materializes the intangible nature of sexting, transforming the digital nude into an artistic object. Her work questions intimacy in the age of ephemeral images, re-signifying it into a permanent residue. In Julieta Glasserman’s dreamlike landscapes, sexuality and anguish intertwine: her pieces transmute phobias and worries into scenes of haunting beauty, where her own body becomes a visual diary of her psyche. They question whether this body is truly theirs to explore, or if it is the untouchable temple they were told it should be. A new, visceral curiosity is born—a desire to know the body deeply: why not open it up and dissect it? In doing so, a playful self-representation emerges, one that addresses desire from a scrutinizing yet wholly personal gaze. That scopic drive which socially permeates us is now seized by the hands of the artists, who translate it into works that both confront and seduce. Leonor Silvestri speaks of pleasure as a trench—a place where desire does not surrender to morality nor to the expectations of liberation. In these works, pleasure is deformed, hidden, and offered to the viewer as a challenge: not to be understood, but to be felt. Desire is sliced through and haunted by anguish, made visible here as bodies that falter under the gaze of others. Luna Dannon constructs images where the body attempts to dominate itself, in constant tension between containment and overflow. Julieta Glasserman presents the body as the mouth of an endless tunnel inhabited by our grudges, preserving the erotic image in a tactile and material dimension. Vanessa Karin takes us to a post-dream state where the body becomes a mutant creature, oscillating between fragility and monstrosity. The artists offer fragments of themselves as if they were candies or fleeting indulgences. For a moment, their bodies abandon the everyday to be urgently exposed in dreamlike worlds that oscillate between the utopian and the dystopian. These spaces seem to promise the liberation so proudly heralded by certain feminist discourses that, in their attempt to free, end up reproducing new norms around overflowing desire. However, these artists are not looking to fit into a pre-written narrative. They do not offer a moral solution or a clear vindication: they show us a body in process, in crisis, and in play. A rite of passage toward new corporeal ideals. They lead us to deform ourselves before the mirror, creating a place where the need to caress absence becomes a form of self-representation, and discomfort, a way to contain desire. — Macarena Puelles
