… principles of pleasure …
By Daniel G. Alfonso
Since I met her I consider myself a fan of her creations and I have followed her ever since, because when you come into contact with her work you keep revisiting her universe; it is like some kind of artistic drug that you can’t get away from. This is the moment to reflect again and analyze the current state of her career; these are other moments and new perspectives.
Marlys Fuego’s work within contemporary artistic practices is based on the treatment of eroticism as main theme, it is a liberating construction of hedonism as tool that makes us spectators of pleasure and transforms the body into a cartographic map that guides us and makes us reflect about life, sexuality, etc.
It is then that we can appreciate how the curtains are opening to give space to a whole production that reflects the human condition hidden inside us; it is a task that liberates all our pleasures.
A starting point, a point of reflection and which summarizes a large part of her work is found in the exhibition Pink (Galiano Gallery, Havana), a show in which she is very conscious of the experience created for the public and how she manages to establish an internal conversation about the space, the works and the infinite possibilities to interpret the pieces. The gallery was transformed into a Sex Shop for the occasion, a turning point in which each work dialogued through invisible threads in all directions, connecting by theme, aesthetics, format and the spectator’s own gaze.
The artist knows perfectly well what the transformation of space means; it is a metaphor that is linked to her own evolution and the different changes she has had in her work. Marlys does not move away from painting, but indeed she does from the academic aesthetics of her initial days, since now her interests are more attached to contemporary concepts and practices in which she begins to use glitter, sequins, pearls, and her own figure to emphasize her own discourse as “a visible trend, assumed from multiple strategies. Particularly recognizable and striking is the aspect in which the artist’s image appears in the work of art, or her body is used as a representation sign. Symptomatic of this production (…) is precisely how, based on the research of the “self”, discourses that are highly involved with the socio-cultural context are made from a critical standpoint.”.i
It is likewise a period of aesthetic pluralism in her work in which photography, installation, environment, and video, among others, appear; all expressive media that facilitate the exteriorization of her new sensibility. A search that, as already mentioned, has always been focused on the treatment of eroticism and sexuality, themes that – as expressed by the artist during our conversation –, have always been addressed by men. However, now she approaches this subject from the perspective of the (creative) woman who has always been used as an object of desire.
For Marlys Fuego, this is an invitation to travel to the island of Citerea, where we can be part and accomplices of unique experiences and, moreover, where we find and enjoy the most intimate carnal desire.
i. Onedys Calvo. «Nuevas tentaciones de Narciso». Nuevas tentaciones de Narciso. Ediciones Boloña, 2015. p. 15.
