TEXTIL: POETRY, SYMBOL, AND SIGN IN CONTEMPORARY TEXTILES
BY JULIO SÁNCHEZ BARONI
Embroidery by Men
Gender issues have permeated society and art in recent decades. One notable milestone was the approval of same-sex marriage in 2010, with Argentina becoming the first country in Latin America to recognize this right. Some artists reacted against the social imperative that confined activities like embroidery, weaving, and sewing to the feminine domain, adopting these practices as a form of activism. This was the case for the duo Chiachio & Giannone (Chiachio, Buenos Aires, 1969; Daniel Giannone, Córdoba, 1964), Marino Balbuena (Buenos Aires, 1965), Maximiliano Venturini Stechina (Rosario, 1982), among others.
Marino Balbuena worked professionally as a photographer for various media and was also involved in creative photography. He studied at the Argentine School of Photography and participated in workshops with Alberto Goldenstein, Fabiana Barreda, Eduardo Gil, and Juan Travnik. His career took a turn around 2015 when he dedicated himself exclusively to textile art:
While caring for my sick father, I began to embroider a photo for fun to pass the time; it was a picture of a house front. I got excited and then directly embroidered a house without using a photo as a base. Those embroidered houses were selected for the XXI Visual Arts Award in 2017.
When his father—a photographer of significant physical stature—passed away, Balbuena left behind the houses and focused solely on embroidering male figures, mainly inspired by nude photos taken with a cellphone camera. The perfection of these bodies (at least according to the concept of hegemonic beauty) contrasts with the incomplete finish of the embroidery. In this way, he creates tension between what is publicly displayed and each individual’s reality. He may also draw from images found on Grindr, a dating app for men, as seen in his work Salvame la noche (2019), which received the Second Prize at the 108th National Salon.
Balbuena questions the role of social media in his Mirror Men series (2017), inspired by photographic self-portraits or selfies intended for posting on Instagram, Facebook, or other social networks. Balbuena transforms that excessive obsession with taking photos at any moment into "a series of embroideries that, based on photos captured from the web, highlights the contrast between the immediacy of the digital self-portrait and the time and dedication required for embroidery."
In 2017, during an artist residency in Loma Bola (Córdoba), he created Performina, an action in which he lay on a table dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, allowing several women to take the needles and thread—previously embedded in a piece of wood—to embroider and sew his clothes, like a maternal ritual of healing the son.
Embroidery by Men
Gender issues have permeated society and art in recent decades. One notable milestone was the approval of same-sex marriage in 2010, with Argentina becoming the first country in Latin America to recognize this right. Some artists reacted against the social imperative that confined activities like embroidery, weaving, and sewing to the feminine domain, adopting these practices as a form of activism. This was the case for the duo Chiachio & Giannone (Chiachio, Buenos Aires, 1969; Daniel Giannone, Córdoba, 1964), Marino Balbuena (Buenos Aires, 1965), Maximiliano Venturini Stechina (Rosario, 1982), among others.
Marino Balbuena worked professionally as a photographer for various media and was also involved in creative photography. He studied at the Argentine School of Photography and participated in workshops with Alberto Goldenstein, Fabiana Barreda, Eduardo Gil, and Juan Travnik. His career took a turn around 2015 when he dedicated himself exclusively to textile art:
While caring for my sick father, I began to embroider a photo for fun to pass the time; it was a picture of a house front. I got excited and then directly embroidered a house without using a photo as a base. Those embroidered houses were selected for the XXI Visual Arts Award in 2017.
When his father—a photographer of significant physical stature—passed away, Balbuena left behind the houses and focused solely on embroidering male figures, mainly inspired by nude photos taken with a cellphone camera. The perfection of these bodies (at least according to the concept of hegemonic beauty) contrasts with the incomplete finish of the embroidery. In this way, he creates tension between what is publicly displayed and each individual’s reality. He may also draw from images found on Grindr, a dating app for men, as seen in his work Salvame la noche (2019), which received the Second Prize at the 108th National Salon.
Balbuena questions the role of social media in his Mirror Men series (2017), inspired by photographic self-portraits or selfies intended for posting on Instagram, Facebook, or other social networks. Balbuena transforms that excessive obsession with taking photos at any moment into "a series of embroideries that, based on photos captured from the web, highlights the contrast between the immediacy of the digital self-portrait and the time and dedication required for embroidery."
In 2017, during an artist residency in Loma Bola (Córdoba), he created Performina, an action in which he lay on a table dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, allowing several women to take the needles and thread—previously embedded in a piece of wood—to embroider and sew his clothes, like a maternal ritual of healing the son.
Historia General del Arte en la Argentina, Vol. XIII, 2020–2022, pp. 206–208.
10 November 2024
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