IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 3 ENGLISH | Page 38

houses or shantytowns, in which the rules of behavior recall the urban jungle. The desacralization of the aesthetic paradigm, socialized icons, emblems and signs generates a system of values in ‘another’ reality, an ‘other’ reality. This imagining is closer to a direct language, although the practice of disenchantment leads to ‘carnivalization’ and masks. Each subject can willingly obey the rules of his or her own instincts; obliqueness and cynicism sustain an aesthetic theory as a countercultural act of resistance; the character of the intellectual is shown to have a staunch critical conscience against everything: inconformity, mockery, choteo [Cuban style mocking humor], satire and irony that are expressed with obscene language and a post-revolutionary perspective. This is not about revealing a directly attacking behavior against society, but rather whether or not that reality is disconnected from any other political or ideological commitment to a certain system, or even to any form of indoctrination: it is a way to keep their free and independent status. A poetics of despair is a model for reflection about an unsalvageable reality, one from which people have distanced their selves and to which they cannot return once they are hurt. Rocío García La maja Geisha [The Geisha Youth], 1996. Oil paint on cloth. 38 On the other hand, one also sees a form of introspection, a self-examination and avoidance of collective dialog, of the majority’s rhetoric. In this nihilist context, the individual is increasingly concerned about his or her life and everydayness in an individualized struggle for survival. What one sees in the plastic arts is the emergence of the Geishas series, by Rocío García (1955), with its feminine poetics. The subtleties of the facial expressions and social re-contextualization of their characters treat the feminine condition with irony, with profound lineal and chromatic austerity. Their antecedents can be found in an earlier imagining of “girls” who are shown to be lost, tied up, hung, and dominated by the image of culture, in an attack on closed identities. This creates a psychologically unqualifiable path and transmutation, and later enshrines a reign of violence and subjection through a profuse intertextual game with the Hombres machos marineros [Manly Sailormen] book series. Rocío García’s ability to highlight a relationship of feminine denunciation is unique in its perspective and enjoys warning us about the fragility of the male sexual condition, as can be seen in certain typologies concerning the embarrassment and camouflaging of male psychosexual identity Rocío García Ducha eléctrica [Electric Shower], 1999. Oil paint on cloth. . Rocío García Torturándote [Torturing You], 1999. Oil paint on cloth.