Claudio Perna, a conceptual artist and geographer, was born in Milan, Italy and migrated to Venezuela in 1955, where he explored conceptual practices based on performance, film, photocopies, and photography. As its title announces, Venezuela – Map Series belongs to a prolific set of works (1970–1990) in which Perna expressed, through the insistent use of maps, his desire to achieve a comprehensive knowledge of Venezuelan territory. These systems of geographical representation were transformed into collages incorporating magazine clippings, newspapers, drawings, and objects such as cigarettes, identity cards, and personal photographs. In this piece, the artist assembles photocopies of traditional threads used in Venezuelan textiles, a picture of a hand holding an open scissor, and an isolated vertebra, elements whose meaning are defined by their linear functionality. They are confronted with a close image of the lines created by an open shirt that slowly reveals a hairy chest, right next to the representation of the frontier between Colombia and Venezuela. An exemplary case of how, through the study of the land, he looked for the possibility to know himself, creating a link between art, territory, and subjectivity.
—Nicolas Cuello
