Claudia Casarino, Fredi Casco, Ricardo Migliorisi y Osvaldo Salerno

Asunción

Asunción

Paraguay is an island surrounded by land in the heart of the continent in words of Augusto Roa Bastos. Scholar art from Asunción could be thought of as another island, surrounded by popular art, which, sometimes, contaminates and defines it within globalization.

In the late sixties, Ricardo Migliorisi (Asunción, 1948 - 2019) takes on a vital journey through drawing, sustained in the sensitivity of psychedelic culture. In the awareness of the external aspects of Paraguayan art, he assumes a language on its own in order to develop a hybrid image in content and in form taking notes from Surrealism and Pop Art, Hippie Culture and Show Business. His work dwells on the creative process ensured by a persistent erotic pulse, a humorous sexuality that claims individual freedom and the enjoyment of the body amidst the constriction of dictatorship. In front of controlled bodies, he puts hybrid and mixed bodies that can imitate beasts or objects, where the female condition can be queer. It´s the leap for Paraguayan art towards a bizarre contemporaneity and all that entails.  

In Osvaldo Salerno´s work (Asuncion, 1952), the crucial moment is not when he decides to imprint his body but the process in which he takes that decision as his main aesthetic. His first prints entail his intention to work with what is real from the idea of “printing” the value of what has been inked. His works from the seventies are set in the premise of sequence and dismount. A minor disturbance can altered the order of the sequence and it can also deliver a sense of uncertainty about the stability of the real world and its representation. If it´s plausible to connect his prints of keys, locks and sleeves as a metaphor for oppression, it also could take account the innovation in the technical procedure in pieces like A Villard de Honnecourt, obrador medieval and Cartel, among others.  The imprint of objects and the dismount sequence (for example: La ventana) are a prologue to printing with his body that ceases, in the nineties, with Sudario. Suite Vollard is the exact counterpart: a display of sexuality as the opposite of the extinction that the tortured bodies anticipated. However, there is no enjoyment. The erection and the recess of the penis resemble a production rhythm instead of pleasure. Salerno undertakes printmaking as a theoretical approach about reproduction.

Fredi Casco (Asunción, 1967) works in the intersection between memory and politics. In the series, El retorno de los brujos –name for the advertised book by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier about lost civilization, aliens and nazi esoteric stories- that gathers photographs found in the Asunción market, he delivers a discourse about politics, power and mundane everyday life during the dictatorial regime of Stroessner. In the first volume, the double and the gas mask redesigned the original image revealing the hidden terror of formal events. In the second volume, the idea of duplicating separates from the visual resource, it becomes an operation between image and text. The family story about the meeting with Graham Greene in Asunción in 1969 is the starting point to build a fiction that plays with family memories, police and social archives like in Cold War novels. The artist through investigation of the archive objectivizes the oral source, which is charged with subjectivity. George Cukor put the novel Viajes con mi tía by Greene –that in part is set in Paraguay- into film in 1972. In a way, Casco photographs remind us of the cinematographic ambiance sieved by afternoons in front of the family television in the seventies.

Apyte Ao by Claudia Casarino (Asunción, 1974) is an installation of raw linen dresses that rolled up in the base. In Paraguay, textile is associated with the common woman who has brought up the domestic livelihood since the times of the Colony as far as the present day. It’s not about the garments being displayed in the open space. Casarino questions the role of women as a work force from these dresses. The length of the fabric when it’s rolled up on the floor reflects a circular idea of time and, at the same time; it opposes the light tension of the suspended fabrics. Those impossible and absent bodies make a more prominent statement of the presence of the female as a reconsideration of the patriarchal system. In the late capitalism, power practices its supremacy making invisible the otherness, sentenced it to silence. Casarino generates a strange beauty of absent bodies through long fabrics displayed as a circle as if a ritual or a round is taking place, similar to the common embrace in which equal causes are raised.

Roberto Amigo

Art Historian, investigator and teacher at Instituto del Desarrollo Humano (UNGS) and at Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (UBA)

 

Claudia Casarino (Asunción, 1974)

Visual artist. She studied Visual Arts in the ISA of the National University of Asuncion. She has studied sculpture, etchings and drawings in New York and London. She has showed her work since 1998 participating in five editions of Biennial of Mercosur, Biennial of La Habana, Tijuana, Busan, Cuenca, Curitiba, Argelia and Venice, as well as the triennials in Santiago and Puerto Rico; and in different gallery shows, museums and cultural centers in Asuncion, Santiago, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Bogota, Madrid, Barcelona, Milan, Amman, London, among others. Her work is included in collections such as Museo del Barro de Asuncion, Victoria & Albert Museum in London, BID in Washington DC, Spencer Museum in Lawrence, Kansas and Casa de las Américas in La Habana. Since 2006, she is the head of Fundacion Migliorisi, Asuncion.

 

Fredi Casco (Asunción, 1967)

Visual artist and writer. His work has been showcased in exhibitions such as the III and V Biennial of Mercosur, in Porto Alegre in 2001 and 2005; Biennial of Valencia, Spain in 2007; Downey Effect in Fundacion Telefonica in Buenos Aires, 2006; Second Biennial of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, Greece in 2009; 10th Biennial in La Habana, Cuba in 2009; 55th Biennial in Venice and “Latin America 1960-2013 Photographs in the Cartier Fondation pour l’art contemporain” in Paris, 2013. His works are part of permanent collections of Fondation Cartier pour l´art contemporain; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Stanislas and Leticia Poniatowski, Bogotá, Colombia; CAV/Museo del Barro. In 2013, he made the film Revuelta(s) with Renate Costa for Fondation Cartier pour l´art contemporain. He participates in the editorial committee of the magazine Sueño de la Razón. He is co-founder of Ojo Salvaje, Photography month in Paraguay and the independent publishing house Ediciones de la Ura, Asuncion.

 

Ricardo Migliorisi (Asunción, 1948 - 2019)

Painter, wardrobe artist, set designer and architect. He studied in Cira Moscarda’s artist studio

and in Livio Abramo’s print making workshop. He studied Architecture in the National University of Asuncion. Since 1974, he has made solo shows in Asunción, Medellin, Lima, Roma, París, Graz, Montevideo, among others.  He participated in the Biennial of Medellin in 1968; in the Biennial of printmaking of San Juan in 1979; in the Biennial of Cuenca, Cali, La Habana. His works take part of private collections in Spain, United States, Venezuela, Uruguay, Argentina, Mexico, Italy, Brazil, Peru, Sweden, Japan, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia, France, Ecuador, Chile, Netherlands, Germany and Paraguay. He has received several awards, among them: Afiches (United Nations, 1972); Benson & Hedges (Asunción, 1982) and Biennial of Paper (Buenos Aires, 1986).

 

Osvaldo Salerno (Asunción, 1952)

Architect, printmaker, graphic designer, curator and museographer. Director and co-founder of Museo del Barro, Asuncion. He studied Architecture in the National University of Asuncion and printmaking with Oscar Manesi and Alfredo de Vincenzo in Buenos Aires, Argentina. As well, he studied illustration in the Academia of San Fernando, Madrid, Spain. Since 1974, he has had regular solo exhibitions in Asuncion.  He also has had solo shows in Madrid, Barcelona, Curitiba, Guatemala, Concepción and Santiago de Chile, among others. He has participated in the Biennial of Valencia, Biennial of Mercosur, Triennial of Chile and others. His works are represented in museums and collections in Spain, Iraq, Argentina, Peru, Brazil, Colombia, Chile and Paraguay.  He is the museographer for Archivo de Terror in the Supreme Court of Justice. He was headmaster of Cultural Heritage in the Secretaria Nacional de Cultura.

 

 

Herlitzka + Faria would like to thank the galleries Mor Charpentier, Paris and Maria Casado, Buenos Aires for their collaboration with works by Fredi Casco and Claudina Casarino.