Opening 22 March | LOCAL 2, Santiago
Life is inherently dialogic and human beings participate in this dialogue through words and with their entire being: eyes,
lips, hands, soul, spirit, and whole body.
Mikhail Bakhtin
In Cocó Caballero’s work, painting and embroidery become tools to reveal an altered memory, where family images emerge from the shadows with an unsettling aura. As if they were snapshots rescued from a forgotten album, her compositions capture scenes of celebrations, gatherings, and collective rituals, transformed by subtle dark humor that distances them from nostalgia and brings them into an irreverent and playful dimension.
Her compositions, primarily framed in dark backgrounds, function like fragments of a camera obscura, where images are revealed with a skewed, distorted, almost theatrical light. Like in a carnivalesque ritual, the figures seem suspended in a play space that subverts hierarchies and blurs the boundaries between humans and non-humans. As in a contemporary Last Supper, the figures share a common space where the familiar mixes with the unsettling. Here, the influence of the Russian historian, theorist, and critic Mikhail Bakhtin and his study of the logic of carnival becomes evident: in this pictorial world, the grotesque, the symbolic, and the excessive function as a strategy of visual resistance.
The characters inhabiting her works appear torn from their original context and relocated to a setting of theatricality and estrangement. Their vacant gazes, their gestures frozen in time, and the repetition of symbols evoke Henry Darger's aesthetics and Surrealism's dreamlike logic. In this recomposition of the past, Freud’s concept of the uncanny becomes key: what should be familiar takes on a disturbing quality, challenging the perception of reality. This dimension is amplified in her work through the use of vibrant colors in specific details—such as painted lips—and the tension between the materiality of embroidery and the gestural quality of the painting.
In this play of light and shadow, embroidery acts as a suture for the image, a manual gesture that rewrites the history of the depicted figures. By integrating textiles, Cocó connects with a tradition of artists such as Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin, for whom sewing and weaving are tools of subjective inscription, repair, and subversion. But here, the thread does not only unite; it also tightens, conceals, and resignifies, becoming a material echo of the fragility of memory.
Beyond the personal record, Cámara Oscura proposes an exercise in reinterpreting the image as a space of multiple layers. Memory is not a stable territory here but a mutable construction permeable to intervention and chance. As in analog photography, where light and time alter the final result, Caballero’s work deconstructs the close and familiar image to reconstruct it, leaving the viewer in a constant oscillation between the visible and the hidden, between play and mystery.
Natalia Herrera, artist and theorist
March 2025
