A Very Anxious Feeling: Voices of Unrest in the American Experience - Catalog - Page 42
MARÍA FRAGOSO
I believe that focusing on the intimacy of our lives matters.
Through the depiction of figures and their interactions between
them, intimacy turns into a moment of transcendence. The
figures are simultaneously observing themselves and trying to
reach to the other; mirroring each other while looking for an
all-consuming relationship. Juxtapositions between beauty
and the uncanny are an invitation to question ourselves and
complicate (literally, wringing and twisting) what we understand
as identity. Introducing confusion in social dynamics is how I try
to unsettle their regularity, distort their traditional form. I like to
represent coupling, eating, touching; actions that epitomize the
intrinsic longing for human connection. This emphasis on plurality
and heterogeneity in my paintings is meant to posit challenge on
the idea of an unequivocal, oversimplified Latin American identity.
When I started living and working in America for the first time,
I was struck by a whole new context. My practice was marked
by the influence of other artists who engaged with issues of
race, culture, and sexuality in the attempt to transgress existing
delimitations of identities. I comprehended, for example, how
extremely diverse, mutable, and protean Latinx experiences are.
It must also be said that my arrival in America coincided with
deep sociopolitical changes in this country, which was crucial to
my experience. I arrived to Baltimore in 2015 after the protests
over Freddie Gray’s death; that same year I started painting.
Two years later, Trump’s presidency started. The question of
limits became tangible with all the violence that has always
accompanied the urge to draw clear and crisp borders between
countries, identities, and ultimately families. During this period,
a very derogatory narrative started spreading around Latin
American identity. Under these circumstances, raising one’s voice
is a necessity to oppose the implementation of rigid colonial,
42
María, Skowhegan, 2019
