What are the body’s material and discursive limits? What is the territory of “a genitality” that finds its own way and evolves without prejudices into an expanded sexuality, a sexuality filled with signifying human practices?

Whoever has suffered numberless exclusions and “eliminations” form the symbolic and collective universe, whoever has been sieged and isolated from her/his own condition and identity experience, never stops questioning the disturbing and dominating politics that, for centuries, have delimited a finite field for the body, assigned a limited use to its potentialities and stigmatized millions of desiring subjects.

This imperative and oppressive limit, with which an imaginary horizon, an enclosed space was established for the body, made lives explode, bereaving them of any recognizable humanity. Hugo Palmar’s works invite us to think about the history of an allegedly “strange” humanity, thus calling into question a feared “ethnopoetics” of sex, barbarism and loneliness.

His works show a number of formless and informing bodies; bodies that become abyss and trim themselves into a cancelled territory; bodies that although traveling through a known space, set on fire a metaphorically forgotten place.

His paintings, in their need to establish relationships, to build and share both lived and imagined worlds, express feelings and dissent, memories and experiences mixed with food that cannot feed, clothes that cannot shelter. Painted in bubble-gum pink, weakly delineated and with a deep encircling brush-stroke, Palmar’s bodies are tormented and bled out flesh, torn flesh, a space in memory seeking to evince the oppression and the
pain of the sexes; “bodies that weep” and, like many others, cannot embrace confronted to a repressive political sphere that grows and chases away the egalitarian relationships.

While his paintings attempt to create a didactic space of subordination and make more complex the debate over those excluded categories of gender, his videos roam hovering in the tide of transience, move in ample beginnings filled with shortages, thus capturing the idea of a over-modernity full of anonymity, surrender and wreck.

Hugo Palmar thus brings to light multiple shelters, full of militia and courage. He points out –certainly not with the will of the powerful– that even when we believe we are moving onto more memorable surroundings that expand gender and sexuality, art and the body become again the thermometer needed to illuminate certain surroundings of violent and fossilized naturalization, certain stereotypes that continue to well up and “to configure the materialized foundation of power arrangements”, that absurd sovereignty into which some people weave the norms of gender, norms that many, either under command or out of shyness, are forced to suffer and/or renounce.

By Daniel Fischer
Resistencia, El Chaco, Argentina, 2015.

Text for the exhibition May you have a body, Super Political and Stateless. MACZUL 2015. Museography and curatorship: Jimmy Yánez.