Luisi Llosa

Walking together: for them and for us

Aquí dejo los residuos de mi dolor. Here I leave the residues of my pain.

As if they were cinerarias, Luisi Llosa's jars keep the pain. The tears that lay in the seven containers are a mechanism of catharsis and memory. In a gesture that materializes violence, suffering and restlessness, the artist takes artistic language as means of self-healing and liberation.  "Here, in this supreme danger," wrote Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy - "approach him, art, as a magician who saves and heals: only he is capable of twisting those nauseous thoughts about the dreadful or absurd of the existence… ”.

The material accumulation of pain, expressed in crying, manifests itself as ashes of the body: pieces torn off, violated and reduced forever, and whose natural place of permanence is the memory that appears as a living condition of the present. Over the course of seven years, Llosa has charted a path with the aim of externalizing psychic discomfort. She presents us here with an exercise for independence, but not as a total liberation, but rather as a way to lighten the burden of suffering through the fragile work of art, the sublime, understood in The Birth of Tragedy, as "artistic submission of the dreadful”

.Here I leave the residue of my pain is a work that emerges from the bowels, a work built from necessity. In this sense, the artist's tears are not limited to the artistic field, but also constitutes a testimony of mistreatment, abuse and psychological violence.  The tears, collected annually in each of the flasks exhibited, establish a single body of pain whose cause and beginning in time are unique and whose extension is uncertain. The containers, being positioned in a horizontal line, refer to the repetition and permanence of suffering.  Each year does not establish an overcoming of pain, on the contrary, it reaffirms it. 

However, the absolute gesture resides in the support of the work.  The rusty steel plate alludes to the weight of time and the brutality of traumatic memory. On the other hand, the curves engraved on the base reproduce the Forgetting Curve, developed based on the Hermann Ebbinghaus memory studies.  Llosa falsifies these curves with the only possibility, implicitly exhibited, that these sobbing-filled jars can multiply in time just by accessing that past sculpted in abuse.

It is inevitable to think of the jars as if they were cinerary.  In the same way that we preserve the cremated remains of our loved ones in those vessels, Luisi Llosa preserves her own remains, the multiple deaths of her self-love.  Because nobody wants to keep very close to that or to those who have left, but neither do we allow ourselves to make them disappear forever; because nobody wants to carry pain all their lives, but neither can we conceive our identity outside of those tears that, like a chisel, have shaped our most private face in detail.

Luisi Llosa (Perú, 1981)

Llosa advocates to the body as a disposable thing, understanding it as the place where all the wounds of our society caused by violence, inequality and war take shape. The body is presented as an abstract place, fragile and prone to to be violated, as a place that in its surface carries all the wounds that we cause each other.

Her artistic development has opted in a stable and deepening way, for painting, sculpture and installations. She has been assuming the language of the gestural plasticity of the material, the invoice and texture, the color and the form both accidental and controlled, among other complexities of the visual syntax of these fields.

BIO

He studied Visual Arts at the Escuela Superior de Arte Corriente Alterna. She then traveled to Sydney where she was invited for a year to do a residency and begin to figure out what her topic of interest really was. Her works have been presented in various group and solo exhibitions in Lima, Washington, Madrid, Chile, Bogotá, Argentina and Sydney, among other cities. Her works are in various private collections of Peruvian and foreign collectors. Her  work is based on the idea of showing the most basic and primary sensations of daily life and the daily confrontation of us, as human beings with humanity, showing the contradictions and ruptures that come from inhabiting this world.

WORKS INCLUDED IN THE EXHIBITION