Artist: Benjamín Cieza Hurtado
Exhibition title: Las fuerzas y el equilibrio
Venue: Enhorabuena Espacio, Madrid, Spain
Date: June 28 – August 17, 2024
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Enhorabuena Espacio, Madrid
Until a few decades ago, the print culture in Peru formulated the big questions about individual destiny within a broader framework where politics functioned as everyday language. The apparent separation between mass culture and politics came later, during the 1990s, when the cultural industry shifted towards creating a media spectacle that actively sought to block reflection on the structural processes where experience takes place.
Benjamín Cieza Hurtado presents here a series of paintings based on Tu Destino, a magazine that combined astrological orientations, paranormal news, advice for everyday life, occultist theories, and various commercial and cultural advertisements from Peru in the late 1970s.
“Love According to Your Sign,” “The Best Contraceptive: Your Mind,” “Those Who Heal by Faith” are some headlines of this magazine that presented itself as a means to find light in the unknown.
As he has developed in previous projects, in “Las fuerzas y el equilibrio” Benjamín approaches the document in search of images that, after respective cropping and reframing, will serve as the basis for new pictorial processes. On one hand, it is about directing the gaze towards certain details typical of the iconography that accounts for an era through its visuality and, on the other hand, working from the materiality that these images contain (color, line, print pattern, etc.).
Although the textual information surrounding the images in the magazine is not incorporated into his pictorial versions, it is key to understanding the reasons behind the choice of each one: a recipe for a magical cau cau to attract a man through food; photographs of pre-Columbian idols that allude to an indigenous mysticism or an occult science to cure the ailments of the soul; a miraculous girl, Catalina Aponte, who heals the sick in a popular neighborhood of Lima; the story of the farm worker Martín Almeyda, whose ghost continues working the land of his master, as he remained in debt after making a pact with a demon who offered him a lot of gold; etc.
In each case, what Benjamín brings into play is the exploration of an esoteric visual universe that aimed to inscribe itself among a popular audience, in a historical moment where individual experience and the processes of transformation of social structures were thought of in a more fluid way than today. Each work can be seen as an ideological fragment of other times that invites us to think about which images function similarly in the present.
-Text by Mijail Mitrovic
