José Luis Luzardo’s dildos fill the Plastic Arts Center

Luzardo, who inaugurates this delivery on Thursday, April 18, at 7:00 p.m., in the aforementioned space located at number 8 Colón Street, in Vegueta, assures that this proposal (linked to the call for exhibition projects in 2022 promoted by the Ministry of Culture of the Gran Canaria Cabildo) arises as a result of the impact of AIDS in the 80s and the contagion of the disease as a global stigma, mainly in the poorest countries. In his different series in which he has worked recurrently for years, he has proposed to present us with a discourse whose interest lies in the capacity for deconstruction and resignification of the ‘marginal’.

Since 2002, Luzardo has been working with the intervened dildo as an artistic object, inviting the public to reflect through the image and texts about life and the sexuality that raises so much taboo in society from ancient times to the present. His first pieces emerged in the form of objects and as a result, he then proposed the creation of other types of works linked to photography and installation, many of them with a very ‘kitsch’ aesthetic.

«Objects are constructed or modified when changing employment that are presupposed to them, be they boxes or colored bottles with penises that represent the phallic. Fetishized dildos that work regardless of who can use them, from another possible imaginary. The vaginain turn, becomes a dose of color, forming the mandala of desire, a circle that represents the origin of the world, but also a reflection regarding the gender violence. Images, from one conception or another, that investigate the paradigm of sexual differences and life and death,” explains the creator, of whom the Atlantic Center for Modern Art (CAAM) also exhibits one of his works, ‘The last game 1968’, inscribed in this aesthetic of dildos in the exhibition ‘Recent memory. Contemporary practices in the CAAM collection.

The exhibition ‘Poetics of Desire’ coincides in time with the exhibition currently on display by the creator at the House of Culture Agustín de la Hoz of Lanzarote, titled ‘Around the Earth’.

The artist reflects with his works on the dimension of sex as a taboo and as an element that throughout history has raised so much concern in society, through irony, humor and criticism. The dildo as a totemic element or image, linked to ritualization, the mythology of origin, pleasure or eroticism, capitalizes on the plastic discourse of Luzardo, who highlights “its common use among different sexualities (transgender, transsexual, binary, lesbian, homosexual, heterosexual, etc.)

The art collector and exhibition curator Antonio P. Martin advances that Luzardo «has developed an intense artistic career characterized by social and critical commitment around research and reflection inspired by readings of works of art, in the form of a groundbreaking, daring, iconoclastic, rebellious and jovial artistic discourse that “It forces us to stop before its pieces and to see the world around us critically.”