Hard Feelings
Only five months after moving to Vienna, I got to exhibit my work for the first time in this city!! This has also been the first time that I’ve shown my paintings in public since 2023.
The exhibition
The exhibition was called Hard Feelings: Bodies Becoming Desire, and it was a group show curated by the Vienna Porn Film Festival (which is apparently famous) in collaboration with the Academy of Fine Kink and Kunst im Keller.
From the official text:
“At the center is the idea of transformation. Bodies and identities are not fixed states, but processes: they are performed, negotiated, and constantly reimagined. The works on display explore how intimacy (in the wake of societal shame) can be reimagined and which forms of sexuality and self-representation open up future spaces of possibility … Here, sexuality is not reduced to the act itself, but is presented as an experiment, a movement, and a constant reinvention of what it means to be human and to desire. HARD FEELINGS invites us to embrace contradictions: between harshness and tenderness, between control and surrender, between who we are and who we could become.”
The space
The venue for the exhibition is called the Semperdepot and it is full of history. It was built in the 1870s as a depot for the stage designs of what was once the imperial court theatre and is now the Burgtheater. After the war, it fell into disrepair and in the 1990s it was renovated and converted into studio and workshop premises for the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (Akademie des Bildende Kunst). It is widely known to the locals, hosting an annual open studio night (called the Rundgang) which showcases the work of the graduate students.
For the exhibition my work was placed inside two beautiful niches.
I showed two paintings. Folie: Hysteria and Folie: Delirium.
Folie: Hysteria (left) and Folie: Delirium (right)
And here are more photos of the show.
The works
Folie: Hysteria was painted first, at the beginning of 2017. I had been living in Barcelona for about a year and a half at that point (after my studies in Florence) and was trying to understand who I wanted to be as a painter and a human. Artistically, I was trying to break with the academic tradition that I had trained in and I wanted to push the boundaries of what painting looked like for me. Personally, I was now fully aware of my queerness and my sexuality and I wanted to be vocal about it. I wanted to be daring, bold, loud, honest and free. In short, I wanted to rebel.
Folie: Hysteria is a self portrait, done from life (using mirrors) in which I tied myself and painted myself mid-struggle. This was important to me - I wanted to show the tension I felt, the mental tug-of-war between comfort and freedom. I didn’t want to pretend anymore, I didn’t want to conform to the societal expectations and rules imposed by a conservative Latino upbringing anymore but I was also far away from being freed from them. This is what I painted. And this had consequences.
Oil on Belgian Linen
100 x 81 cm
2017
Signature in bottom right corner
Certificate of Authenticity provided with purchase
Exhibition History:
2026 Hard Feelings, Semperdepot, Vienna, Austria
2020 Keyhole Art Fair,Murcia, Spain
2019 IN CIRCUM MORBI,Barcelona, Spain
I remember that when my family saw this work for the first time, they threw a fit (to put it mildly) and stopped speaking to me for 6 months. It hurt. I felt so misunderstood and I guess at the time I didn’t know how to explain what I was going through.
And so, with that rebellious spirit and inspired by the pain and anger of being alienated, I painted the counterbalance to Folie: Hysteria - Folie: Delirium. With Delirium I wanted to show that maybe this questioning of my social conditioning was not only something I alone was going through, but other humans as well. People looking at their ties, trying to break free.
Oil on Belgian Linen
110 x 90 cm
2017
Signature in bottom left corner
Certificate of Authenticity provided with purchase
It has been almost 10 years since I painted these paintings. And only recently do I feel like I can muster the words to explain coherently what it was that inspired them and why I painted them. I hope you get to see them in person one of these days.
Here are some photos of Folie: Hysteria and Folie: Delirium throughout the years.
