Feliciano Centurión

Feliciano Centurión produced intimate embroidered textiles that paid homage to indigenous Guaraní weaving techniques, queering traditions passed down from mothers to daughters in Paraguay for generations. Untitled [Stars] features an intricate lace from Paraguay called ñandutí (named for a Guaraní word for ‘spiderweb’). Centurión’s mother taught crafts including ñandutí and sewing throughout his childhood.

Centurión exploited the poetic values of textile: sewing as a means to repair; textile craft as a therapeutic act; blankets and pillowcases as objects of comfort. He frequently worked with the synthetic blankets used for household packing and for shelter by the homeless, cutting and reframing these materials with satin trims. Centurión’s work makes frequent reference to the comfort of home and the pleasure in taking root and making beauty in that home. Centurión was uprooted in his childhood when his family were exiled to Argentina during the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner, and his adulthood was split between the cities of Asunción and Buenos Aires, where he settled but reported to always feel like a foreigner. The importance of finding a home adds weight to this choice of these blankets as the ground for his painting.

Centurión wrote about these blankets in an undated manifesto, later published in the brochure for the exhibition Frazadas: Feliciano Centurión, Galería Fábrica, 1990 (translation by Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro):

'Blanket: everyday object, easily available, warmth, shelter, protection. Affective, sensorial support. The painting is another emotional charge, that translates feelings.

Removed from its everyday context, the blanket becomes a support for painting, in itself an artistic object that, hanging on the wall, can make us recall ancient tapestries.

It is essential that we “choose” the materials with which we work. Our consumer society offers us an infinite selection that we can “appropriate” to make “new objects” with which we can live. But once we decontextualise them, assemble them, paint them, or assail them, they reveal that they passed through our feelings. Consummated love.

The eclecticism of our times, whose diversity of languages and information demand a deeper engagement from us, allows us to “appropriate” with complete freedom so that we can express ourselves.

I embrace the everyday, the banal, the ironic, the playful, happiness, and amusement. Images from dreams, from the everyday, obvious, with a taste of kitsch, all of which confirm to me that painting is simply an act of faith.'