Venus Wounded is the result of a collaboration and exchange between visual artist Maikel Domínguez and poet and writer Eduardo Herrera Baullosa. This exhibition proposes an approach to the female figure and the femininity dimension, substantiated as the leading element—or entity—within the narrative context that builds up links between the visual art and the literary text. An approach formulated from a feeling of oddness arising anytime we face the ontological reality of a different being: indistinctly wonderful, different and alien. In this way, Maikel’s paintings and Eduardo’s poems, focus our attention on the sinuous and ambiguous silhouettes of female characters, whose density and compactness challenge all model subjection. Somehow, the pieces gathered for this exhibition refer to a type of feminine and masculine duality or overlap which act as a metaphor of the artist’s own condition. As it relates to Maikel, the series is a nod in complicity to what has been—and is—his family experience, marked as it is by the impression and value of two female characters: his mother and his grandmother. In Eduardo’s case, there are clear signs of the same level of commitment and belonging, only that in this case that proximity to the topic is marked by absence. In both cases, artist and poet, outline a map in which gender ambiguity and the thickness of the intermediate, determine the conceptual biases of their respective poetics.

Curated by Andrés Isaac Santana