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Victor Hugo Bravo - Work
Victor Hugo Bravo is a Chilean artist, part of a generation that was formed under dictatorship.
Beginning by the 90, his initial interest has been centered in the painting. Later, he would burst in the national scene, with a clear and mature aesthetic idea; wooden hand made objects, armaments as toys, entirely covered with camouflage painting. The painting as camouflage was a gesture of invasion and inversion mediated by color, transforming the three-dimensional object in a two-dimensional one, without hiding its condition of pictorial surface. At the same time provocative phrases like “dominate me”, “fuck me” and others appeared, allusive to power in sexual relationships, expressing the domination of a state and a denied right.
His work manifests not only a subversion of the patriotic symbols, but also the representation of power and submission as matter of gender, but symptomatically inside a macho-military culture.
Converting the vagina in a political icon, fetish that is attractive to the artist, and working at the same time with the religious references, and the toys and sharp objects that suggest armament (as a masculine symbol), his work creates a whole inexistent aesthetic, in which the relations between power, politics and sex pass camouflaged alluding a state of both the Chilean culture and society.
Though, there is no doubt that his work goes further than the iconographic references recently mentioned. The presence of masculine and feminine genitals in relations of power appears hidden. This fact locates his production far from a simple issue of gender or politics. The act of covering, and at the same time exhibiting, is related to the fact that the only present feminine subject is a woman, and the masculine, himself, as the operating axes. (Eros and Tanatos)
Moreover, his work has been the disclosure of his personal experience and the revelation of the relations of power in his own family since his formative phase as an individual.
In another objetual conception Victor Hugo Bravo develops an artwork that demystifies the healthy filial, familiar and educative organization that composes the father and the macho. This symbolic strong figures run into objects in his painting; the ideological and necessary overflow to make themselves tougher, wilder, more anomalous.
This way of inventorying the objetual canon of art, hybrid and politically incorrect supposes –in the spectator – the interpretation of a political, popular and native culture, full of riddles and curses, authoritarianisms and perverted rules.
Beginning by the 90, his initial interest has been centered in the painting. Later, he would burst in the national scene, with a clear and mature aesthetic idea; wooden hand made objects, armaments as toys, entirely covered with camouflage painting. The painting as camouflage was a gesture of invasion and inversion mediated by color, transforming the three-dimensional object in a two-dimensional one, without hiding its condition of pictorial surface. At the same time provocative phrases like “dominate me”, “fuck me” and others appeared, allusive to power in sexual relationships, expressing the domination of a state and a denied right.
His work manifests not only a subversion of the patriotic symbols, but also the representation of power and submission as matter of gender, but symptomatically inside a macho-military culture.
Converting the vagina in a political icon, fetish that is attractive to the artist, and working at the same time with the religious references, and the toys and sharp objects that suggest armament (as a masculine symbol), his work creates a whole inexistent aesthetic, in which the relations between power, politics and sex pass camouflaged alluding a state of both the Chilean culture and society.
Though, there is no doubt that his work goes further than the iconographic references recently mentioned. The presence of masculine and feminine genitals in relations of power appears hidden. This fact locates his production far from a simple issue of gender or politics. The act of covering, and at the same time exhibiting, is related to the fact that the only present feminine subject is a woman, and the masculine, himself, as the operating axes. (Eros and Tanatos)
Moreover, his work has been the disclosure of his personal experience and the revelation of the relations of power in his own family since his formative phase as an individual.
In another objetual conception Victor Hugo Bravo develops an artwork that demystifies the healthy filial, familiar and educative organization that composes the father and the macho. This symbolic strong figures run into objects in his painting; the ideological and necessary overflow to make themselves tougher, wilder, more anomalous.
This way of inventorying the objetual canon of art, hybrid and politically incorrect supposes –in the spectator – the interpretation of a political, popular and native culture, full of riddles and curses, authoritarianisms and perverted rules.
