Desire Appears Suddenly

On this occasion, Instituto de Visión brings together an exhibition that invites us to think about intimacy, the body, and eroticism from the perspective of two powerful Latin American artists, Karen Lamassonne and Aurora Pellizzi. Pellizzi‘s work combines formal precepts of painting and sculpture with craft techniques. His practice is based on pre-industrial textile processes and materials, from natural dyeing to backstrap weaving. The fiber is used both as a pictorial field and materialization of the subject it represents. Lamassonne proposes a series of autobiographical photographs, portraying his body and reflecting on the public and private space, mainly questioning the territory of the intimate.

Both artists deal with body politics: while the woman in Lamassonne’s “Rainy Day Woman” (1978, all photographs reprinted 2022) reveals her body to anyone passing the window, and further photographs, equally shot with simmering tension, depict women in states of domestic intimacy (the bath, the shower), others go further in their exhibitionism. The female subject of “nel foro” (1978) stands in the ruins of the Roman forum, her skirt lifted above her head to reveal her pubis. These fall more into the realms of protest than erotica, though; a sensual nudity used to confront patriarchal culture passed down since time immemorial.