EXTRAORDINARY TRIPS

 

Technique: Slide overlay, support: Magnifying slide light box.

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The work takes the travel diaries preserved in slides from anonymous travelers, I appropriate the slides after having rescued them from fairs or having received them as an inheritance.

I reinterpret the emotions experienced during my travels and in this way I can continue to give life to the photographic collection and the digital medium, which I refuse to lose.

The technique is to superimpose them with the help of frame-by-frame editing, finding in the manner of exposition a surrealist analogical third dimension.

This work currently belongs to a private collection and was also exhibited at the Galeria Q del Arte in Buenos Aires by director Gabriel Bitterman invited by the artist Lobo Velar.

pouring himself into a DJ and printing in golden letters the emblematic song from the Phankey-Rythm Doctor album “Mad Poet”, which tells us about the joy and meaning of the codes of the underground, which in Buenos Aires, the city where the artist lived, and in Montevideo, were a place of learning, where what is then often the food of generations is outlined.

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Going to the intimate fibers of this autobiography, the artist rescues from his archive a video that corresponds to the record of a moment in that legendary Metropolis, a space where different people and their otherness coexisted, a place that the common people could call a gay club, but that far from bias was a space for dissident bodies, for experiences of sexuality, pleasure and the aesthetics of the communities that struggled to find a territory of vital freedom. In this way, the exhibition is configured as a catwalk in time and the artist activates our conscious presence.

Two small-format works focus attention on the construction of another body on stage. This is a photographic series of a film by the well-known porn artist Jeff Stryker, where there is a direction that recalls the path to the underground and also to that which disciplines bodies in tension.

 

While the photo of Calvin Klein models in underwear was an icon in the 90s, the artist intervenes in that photo by taking it to the living room, where desire and the discovery of a hot Buenos Aires are concentrated, with the crossing of molds that respond to the creation of visual arts, fashion and music and their photographic records.
This is where Juan Manuel Barrios proposes a clear and complicit path, a story full of beloved objects that he shares with stirring hope.

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Jacqueline Lacasa (Curator)