La Bellaza de lo Cotidiano - Artishock Magazine
Text in English below:
Feliciano Centurión's (1962–1996) work is a testament to sensitivity, resistance, and visual poetry. His artistic production is distinguished by the use of everyday materials and the appropriation of textile techniques traditionally associated with the "feminine." The exhibition Hope in Bloom, presented at the end of 2024 at Cecilia Brunson Projects (London), brought together a selection of his work, highlighting not only his iconic embroidered blankets but also a series of singular sculptures.
Exiled during his childhood due to the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner, Feliciano Centurión lived between Asunción and Buenos Aires—territories that intertwine in his work through memories, symbols, and materials. In 1980, this dual geography took on new meaning when he moved to Buenos Aires to study at the National School of Art, initiating a process of artistic and personal exploration. Paraguay appeared to him as a restricted territory, not only creatively but also in terms of being able to live freely as a gay man.
Centurión's story is part of a recurring narrative from the Global South: the forced displacement of sexually diverse communities toward big cities in search of freedom and opportunity. Deeply rooted in his biography, his work is both a testament to resistance in the face of life's fragility and a defense of sensitivity in Latin American contemporary art.
The vibrant cultural environment of Buenos Aires played a key role in Centurión's artistic and academic development. By 1987, he was already participating in group exhibitions alongside a group of talented artists who would become essential to his career. That same year, he became actively involved in the art scene at the Centro Cultural Rojas, a key space for the Argentine art scene of the 1980s and 1990s. There, many visual artists found in community and mutual learning a creative drive that would shape the artistic production of the 1990s in Argentina.
For Centurión, this context was not only an artistic catalyst but also an opportunity to affirm his identity. As with any sexual identity silenced by the system, he found in creation a means of liberation. Beyond the new artistic spirit he discovered in Argentina, the possibility of living openly as a gay man in a more receptive environment became a central axis of his experience and his work.
It is essential to consider the South American context of the late 1980s and 1990s: queer and feminist thought currents were beginning to strongly resonate in Latin American cities, while sexual dissidences asserted the nature of their migrations. In that process, the body was consolidated as a contested territory, embodying the phrase the personal is political.
For the group of artists from Rojas, the body and its immediate surroundings became central axes of their work. Their first urgency was to liberate the very concept of art, understanding that aesthetic emancipation and freedom of expression were intrinsically linked to political and social struggles. "Political freedom would be meaningless if the artist cannot express themselves in the most personal and everyday matters," they believed.
Feliciano Centurión not only challenged the conventions of art and gender, but he also left behind a legacy where vulnerability becomes strength and beauty emerges from the most ordinary gestures. Among the most intriguing pieces in Hope in Bloom are the Macetas (Flowerpots), sculptures in which the artist transforms domestic objects into fragments of a reinvented nature. These pieces consist of terracotta pots filled with plaster, from which stems made of brushes, sponges, and kitchen utensils emerge. Through this assemblage, Centurión breathes new life into ordinary elements, endowing them with a symbolic character that resonates with resilience and the poetry of the everyday.
Although he is best known for his textile work, these sculptures reflect his interest in lightness, humor, and the transformation of the ordinary into the sublime. In them, the artist reinterprets the floral motif, a recurring theme in his work, reaffirming his fascination with fragility and ephemeral beauty. The choice of domestic materials reinforces the notion of intimacy and familiarity, as well as the possibility of finding the extraordinary in the simplest and most accessible things.
The outbreak of AIDS in Latin America provoked multiple artistic responses. In Argentina, in particular, art was redefined as a tool for struggle and testimony—from the militant graphics of activist groups like ATC-UP (Association of People Living with AIDS Fighting for Their Rights) to raw representations of the deterioration the disease caused in affected lives.
The HIV diagnosis Centurión received in the mid-1990s marked a turning point in his work, infusing it with a sense of urgency that transformed his exploration of affection into a more direct reflection on life and death. Fragility, always present in his work, ceased to be merely a metaphor and became an inescapable reality. In his final years, his production became filled with embroidered phrases that not only evoked the vulnerability of existence but also the capacity to find beauty and solace in the simplest things. His art began to engage more openly with the idea of death—not from a place of despair, but from a poetics of sensitivity.
Centurión's work stands as one of the most moving testimonies of an artist who worked within the context of the AIDS crisis and during a time of redefinition of homosexuality. His practice, marked by an aesthetic of tenderness, is laden with symbols that allude to memory and re-signification. In his textiles—embroidered with ñandutí, affectionate phrases, and decorative motifs—he recovers Paraguayan textile traditions learned from his mother and grandmother, transforming them into a form of evocation and affection.
Regarding his work, the artist wrote: "It is essential that we 'choose' the materials we work with. Our consumer society offers us an infinite selection that we can 'appropriate' to make 'new objects' to live with. But once we decontextualize them, assemble them, paint them, or intervene in them, they reveal that they have passed through our feelings."
Feliciano Centurión's work reminds us that the artistic can emerge from the everyday and that beauty can be found in the most unexpected places. Hope in Bloom not only preserves his legacy but also reaffirms his ability to move and re-signify the materials and emotions that surround us.