AN INTIMATE NOTEBOOK ABOUT LOVE IN THE THIRD AGE
Un Hombre y una Mujer: Una mirada fotográfica sobre el sexo en la vejez (A Man and a Woman: A photographic look on sex in old age) is the title of the second exhibition of the great Peruvian artist Sonia Cunliffe to be exhibited in Madrid (Spain). Within the programming of the Contemporary Route of Peruvian Art - ARCO, the photographer and artist brings together a series of archive images to the Blanca Soto Arte Gallery the 23rdof February. The letter and photographs constitute a kind of love notebook between a man and a woman.
Since 2008, Sonia Cunliffe has turned to the compilation and reinterpretation of archival materials, mainly photographic. Through this process, the artist reorganizes the materials producing a unique work that locates history as a trigger to address issues of all kinds.
Lost and found archives, photographs and missives, the analysis of the gaze of the body from a love story are the thematic axes of the exhibition Un Hombre y una Mujer. "The work of archiving is recurrent in my body of work, I am especially attracted to discovering and appropriating past looks, creating a new universe for the photos, negatives, letters, postcards that come into my hands," the artist explained in relation to her work.
Un Hombre y Una Mujer are a series of photographs starring César and Paquita. The archive shows a jovial and romantic love at the beginning, and a reunion three decades later at the end. From that love, undisclosed photographs and letters with erotic collages -released by the Peruvian collector Jorge Bustamante- left engravings in the history of the price and the passions of their affections. But the exhibition is not limited to it. From this story, Cunliffe establishes a direct dialogue with love and sexuality in the third age: an installation with a dozen small erotic images occupies the room. Who wants to observe them in detail should do it with a small glass, as intruding on the intimacy of lovers. "I decided to put everything in an old bed," argued Cunliffe, referring to the installation, and added, "fill it with magnifying glasses so that the viewer becomes a voyeur, being responsible for finding and reconstructing the story and its secrets."
Also, the current curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Peru, Guiliana Vidarte, exhibits an essay presented at the meeting of critics and researchers Corps. Eros and politics of PHotoEspaña-Trasatlántica in Miami organized by Gerardo Mosquera. "Cunliffe's proposal is presented as a different statement against the stereotypes created around sex, always related to youth and is proposed, in turn, as a break and provocation against the taboos of sexual desire in old age. Thus the photographer uses the file to reflect on the basic element within the photographic discourse: the vision, and, at the same time, proposes alternative readings on the way in which we conceive sexuality, "concluded Vidarte.
