Peru

Indios antropófagos is a paradox: a post-conceptual exploration of the fiery sensory impact of Amazon culture on certain (neo)Baroque horizons in Peruvian art. But that pulsion throbbing in Christian Bendayán’s work is energised by a critical reconsideration of the Amazon as a constructed image.
A mise-en-scène thus becomes a mise-en-abîme. An operation announced by the rhetorical quotation marks in the show’s title: an act of citing that involves the azulejos and the wrought iron imported from Europe during the rubber boom’s belle époque for the reinvention of Iquitos as a coquette Iberian city ensconced in the heart of Amazonian darkness. That architectural cross-gendering is symbolised by the butterfly: an emblem of the ‘natural’ rainforest, but also of the fantasy associated with transvestite aesthetics. Art sublimated into artifice. And post-conceptualism fused into the (neo)Baroque.