Descripción de la Exposición
Henrique Faria Fine Art is pleased to present Do Ask, Do Tell, a group exhibition that explores “the artistic
construction of homosexual difference in Latin America and the strategies that such a construction have generated
to disrupt entrenched forms of the region’s art”. Presenting works from the 1970s, when the gay rights movement
began gaining traction, through to the present day, this show not only aims to highlight social changes within the last
fifty years and how the images depicting male homoeroticism have evolved with improved social acceptance, but to
shed light on the identity struggles these artists have faced within their own bodies, the cities they lived in and the
greater national and pan-Latin American cultures to which they pertained. The diversity of mediums and artistic
styles seen here reflects the appropriation of conceptual and abstract-geometric visual languages, movements with
strong foundations in Latin America, for the purposes of self-expression and declarations of desire as well as
specific geographic contextualization.
Art historian and curator Juan Ledezma describes these spaces (the body, city and nation/continent) in the
exhibition text as “territories of experience”, which, through the lens of this exhibition, have been mapped out in
terms of alterity and queerness. A central work in the exhibition is Claudio Perna’s Vang-Urgente (1985), a collage
in which photographs of male figures are superimposed over a map of South America, effectively creating a
personal cartography of desire where distance isn’t measured in miles or kilometers but rather by the size of a
lover’s lips. The spirit of a unified continent is implied here, as is the optimism that opening up borders will open up
possibilities for all who live within it.
The exhibition argues that “identification—involved in the bid to ask, to tell—proceeds in terms of the strategic
inscription of queerness that Lee Edelman has called “homographesis”: the multiplication rather than the
constriction of self-identifying marks; the production of ever estranged, always renewable signs through which to
rediscover difference and use it as a creative instrument.” Artists including Miguel Ángel Rojas and Alair Gomes use
the city and its allowance for anonymity and invisibility to capture moments on camera that would otherwise go
unnoticed. Rojas’ series Sobre Porcelana (1969) and Gomes’ Untitled #19 from the series Sonatinas (1977) both
capture the interactions between two males that occurred with the urgency and innocence, respectively, that the
action unfolding was unnoticed. The clippings and articles found in Hudinilson Jr.’s untitled notebook from 1988
demonstrate how alternative social networks were constructed and bolstered using publications and pamphlets that
could be printed and distributed easily to the urban populace.
Of course, as artists looked outward to find a sense of identity within their environments, they also looked to their
own bodies as a source of ‘self-identifying marks’. Hudinilson Jr., Perna and Pedro Terán made intimate, and at
times excruciating, investigations of their bodies and those of their lovers, while Carlos Leppe and Álvaro Barrios
summoned forth more latent aspects of their personas. As Ledezma concludes in his text, the featured artists
“constructed alternative ways for coordinating Latin American-ness and queerness into a non-normative framework
for shared life”. This exhibition is meant as an inclusive invitation, to ask and to tell, and as a standpoint for personal
expansion rather than restriction.
Participating Artists:
Sergio Avello
Álvaro Barrios
Alfredo Boulton
Celso Castro
Armando Cristeto
José Gabriel Fernández
Alair Gomes
Valerio Gámez
Arturo Herrera
Hudinilson Jr.
Eduardo Kac
Carlos Leppe
Carlos Motta
Claudio Perna
Miguel Ángel Rojas
José Sigala
Pedro Terán
Exposición. 17 dic de 2024 - 16 mar de 2025 / Museo Picasso Málaga / Málaga, España
Formación. 01 oct de 2024 - 04 abr de 2025 / PHotoEspaña / Madrid, España
