LOVE ME
Verónica Palmieri - Paulina Miguel
Paulina Miguel was born in Ituzaingó, I, in Buenos Aires. When I moved to the west five years ago, I was very curious to meet local artists, I’m always interested in the local, probably because I have a rather nomadic spirit and I don’t feel part of anywhere. Many people told me about her and we have mutual friends. One day I went to her workshop to formalize a meeting and I find it hard to believe, that was the first-time we saw each other, and because already have a great familiarity. In our meetings a very recurring topic of conversation is Love, both of us are very interested in love relationships, from psychological and scientific level and also in a mystical and metaphysical terms.
We are also interested in alchemical and obscurantism images, the tarot religious and pagan iconography. We are both painters and we have an academic training from Pueyrredón School.
We are both strong women, but we feel that love weakness us and that, at the same time we are always in love with someone, or with the idea of love, because for some woman, especially those of our age, love and freedom seem to be far from each other. We are both mothers and we both fell into similar traps patriarchal mandates. When the possibility of exhibition at the Historical Museum of Ituzaingó arose, we thought it would be good to take women and the place they occupy in love ties as the axis.
Paulina is interested from a place of denunciation and I am from a subjective and symbolic place. Paulina’s work started from historical archives taking the first illustrations in both America and Europe, visual accounts for how they were subjugated or deified according to their hierarchy, how they were hanging from a tree if they looked at someone who didn’t, how the Catholicism’s view of these latitudes and the role of priests, in many cases as controllers of women’s sexuality. Images where men have the right to routinely inspect women’s genitalia to verify their good behavior.
For my part I build archetypes linked to the feeling of love. The images start from timid visualizations and they are loaded with symbolism that are related to me, some popular and others of a religion’s nature, so as a real entity. Everything as Arcanes of love that could warn me what fate could be and also as a work of exorcism to expose loving feelings, with the certainty that in the light, they can no longer harm. They only have power in the shadows.
VERÓNICA PALMIERI