Feliciano Centurión: Hope in Bloom

Feliciano Centurión (b. 1962, Paraguay, d. 1996, Argentina) was part of a pivotal moment in Latin American consciousness, when artists took a turn towards subjectivity, warmth and lightness in the aftermath of a politically turbulent age. The body of work Centurión left behind from his brief career is intimately handmade, attentive to emotion and unashamedly optimistic. Frequently embroidered with aphorisms of love and hope and ornamented with starbursts and blooming flowers, it is invigorated by its political defiance of gender roles and queering of the Paraguayan textile traditions taught by his mother and grandmother, forming one of the most poignant testimonies left by an artist working through the AIDs crisis and an era that redefined homosexuality.

Each Maceta consists of a terracotta flowerpot filled with plaster, from which a single stem, crafted from household objects including brushes, sponges and kitchen utensils, rises proudly like a flower. The artist is known for his textiles, but these core works are exemplary of his pursuit to produce artworks unburdened and light, marked by humour and beaming with life.

Centurión repeatedly returned to the anodyne symbol of the flower, exploiting the great scope of meaning in its short-lived beauty. He reveals the power in the simplest everyday objects: here, the flowerpots unlock something about the comfort of home, the pleasure in taking root and making beauty in that home. This is a notion that recurs throughout the work of Centurión, who was uprooted in his childhood when his family were exiled to Argentina during the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner, and whose adulthood was split between the cities of Asunción and Buenos Aires.

This is also exemplified in the Frazadas [Blankets] exhibited. Centurión frequently worked with the synthetic blankets used for household packing and for shelter by the homeless, cutting and reframing these materials with satin trims. Adorning the works with his painting, ñandutí (a Paraguayan lace), artificial flowers encircled with the lines of a poem, or coasters found in a second-hand shop, he draws upon the poetic values of textiles – sewing as a means of repair, blankets as objects of comfort – and once more extracts deep meaning from objects so commonplace.

The largest work on display, Flores Negras [Black Flowers], 1992, was produced in the year of Centurión’s HIV diagnosis. At over two metres tall, it is one of the last large-scale works he made, representing a fulcrum between his bright, early works and the delicate embroideries that followed throughout his illness. In the thorned, twisting stems and fragile ñandutí petals, he speaks once more of the flower’s allure, rooted in its own ephemerality.