Lo siento mamá :3 brings together the work of Bruna Denegri and Vanessa Karin, two artists who share a common interest in drawing—developed through digital tools—and its narrative, metaphorical, and critical possibilities.

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The thematic spectrum they address revolves around the vast universe of affect, yet it is a territory that proves to be of particular interest to both: the transition from childhood to adolescence, as revealed in the discovery of (genital) sexuality. Consequently, the work of both artists features themes such as friendships, the different forms affection takes, the experience of love and its intensities, the expression of tenderness, and the emergence of desire. However, neither artist shies away from the more complex and thorny aspects of emotional life, such as the anxieties and insecurities produced by social acceptance, the confusion generated by mood swings, the weight and burden of negative emotions, and the ambivalences of self-esteem.

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Bruna Denegri’s characters—girls and women alike, both naive and cunning—establish and embody a critical position against the social status quo. In the face of the collective (and patriarchal) imaginary regarding women, which restricts their possibilities for self-affirmation to socially established roles, the artist deploys a playful, ironic, and psychedelically-tinged imaginary. Denegri breaks that order by resorting to the stridency of a saturated and garish color palette, placing her characters in situations halfway between the innocent and the perverse, endowing her figures with an anatomy between the infantile and the adult, and situating them in fictional settings where the romantic and the sinister blur.

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Vanessa Karin, for her part, represents affection, love, and desire among adolescent women—perhaps schoolgirls—evoking the rapture of the erotic-romantic encounter that places her characters in unreal settings, outside of all ordinary time and place (locally, in Peru: homophobia). It is for this reason that the artist represents starry skies, floating clouds, floral dispersions, and abstract design patterns outside of a defined context. Here, the works suggest an experience rather than a story; a particular narrative and the specificity of its anecdotes matter less than the poetics of emotions suggested by her figures, the details of their gestures, their modes of interaction, and the elements and accessories that accompany them.

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Through their works, both Bruna Denegri and Vanessa Karin confront the question of how we construct, question, and reconfigure our subjectivity. This is a task into which people find themselves thrown and which we undertake in opposing ways: both embracing and resisting identity models, aesthetic options, lifestyles, behavioral roles, discursive stances, and cultural forms in the search for something to call "I". Something as radically one's own as a self-definition, and as extremely foreign as a representation that can only be cross-checked by the other.

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Max Hernández Calvo