Feliciano Centurión: The Eternal Thread

The life and work of Feliciano Centurión were shaped by multiple forms of displacement and exclusion. Born in Paraguay and later settling in Buenos Aires, he was an openly gay artist working within a conservative and heteronormative society, and a classically trained painter who increasingly abandoned the conventional materials of fine art in favour of blankets, aprons, pillowcases and inexpensive fabrics. Through these intimate, everyday materials, Centurión developed an artistic language capable of speaking with extraordinary directness about love, memory, desire, spirituality and the fragility of life.

Centurión came of age under the military dictatorships of Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay and Argentina’s military junta. The return of democracy to Argentina in 1983 opened a radically different cultural landscape. In Buenos Aires, he became closely associated with the community around the Centro Cultural Rector Ricardo Rojas, an important meeting point for a generation of artists who challenged established distinctions between high and low culture, masculine and feminine, fine art and craft. Centurión’s embrace of embroidery and domestic textiles was central to this rejection of hierarchy. Techniques and materials traditionally associated with women, the home and his Paraguayan upbringing became the basis of a deeply personal and distinctly queer artistic vocabulary.

This exhibition brings together six intimate works made during the final and most concentrated period of Centurión’s career. Following his HIV diagnosis in the early 1990s, the scale of his work became increasingly small and intricate. The monumental painted blankets of the preceding years gave way to objects that could almost be held against the body: fragments of cloth, embroidered panels, pillowcases and items of clothing. As his physical world contracted, the emotional and spiritual universe of the work seemed to expand.

Flores del Mal encapsulates many of these contradictions. A red rose emerges from a dark, almost bodily piece of fabric beneath the title embroidered delicately in red thread. The words inevitably recall Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, the nineteenth-century collection whose treatment of sexuality, desire, decadence and the forbidden led to its prosecution for offences against public morality. In Centurión’s hands, the idea of flowers growing from “evil” takes on another resonance. Beauty and illness, desire and morality, pleasure and mortality are allowed to occupy the same space. The flower becomes not an illustration of suffering but an assertion of beauty in its presence.

Elsewhere, Centurión turns towards spirituality. A single monumental eye painted onto tartan fabric suggests an inward as much as an outward gaze. During the years following his diagnosis, questions of spiritual and physical wellbeing became increasingly present in his work. Meditation, faith, the body and the possibility of healing entered an artistic vocabulary that remained strikingly affirmative even as he confronted his declining health. The eye can therefore be understood less as a symbol with a single meaning than as an image of consciousness: watching, awakening and looking inward.

A tiny devotional image in another work recalls the Catholic visual culture in which Centurión was raised. Catholicism existed alongside other forms of spirituality in his imagination, just as inherited traditions coexist throughout his practice with intensely personal reinvention. Reduced almost to the scale of a scapular or private devotional object, the image transforms art into something intimate and protective—something that might be carried close to the body rather than contemplated at a distance.

The embroidered green beetles introduce another world altogether. Scattered playfully across a checked blanket, they belong to the abundant flora and fauna that repeatedly connected Centurión to memories of Paraguay and childhood. Animals in his work are rarely solemn symbols. They are humorous, tender and vividly alive. Against the familiar pattern of the domestic textile, these brilliant creatures turn an ordinary piece of fabric into a small landscape of memory and vitality.

The little dress brings these different strands together particularly beautifully. An object associated with childhood, femininity and domestic life becomes an artwork through Centurión’s careful processes of selection, sewing and assemblage. Like his use of aprons, blankets and pillowcases, the dress collapses distinctions that had traditionally separated craft from fine art and masculine artistic production from forms of making associated with women. It also points towards the matrilineal world of Centurión’s childhood and the textile knowledge that surrounded him from an early age.

Across these five works, the domestic becomes political without ever ceasing to be tender. Centurión responded to a moment in which HIV and AIDS were accompanied by fear, stigma and moral judgement not by reproducing the violence of that rhetoric, but by constructing an alternative language around the body—one made from softness, humour, affection, beauty and care. Embroidered words and humble fabrics offered a profoundly human counterpoint to the public representation of the epidemic.

That so much of Centurión’s work survived is itself remarkable. Much of it was preserved by the people closest to him, particularly his family and partner, initially for emotional rather than art-historical reasons. What was once private—blankets, clothing, memories, declarations of love, objects kept close to the body—has consequently become the means through which his work speaks publicly today.

In the decades since his death in 1996, the histories against which Centurión worked have themselves begun to change. Artists previously marginalised because of geography, sexuality, gender or the materials they chose have become essential to a broader understanding of contemporary art. Seen today, these six modestly scaled works possess an extraordinary clarity. They show an artist facing mortality while insisting upon life: transforming vulnerability into intimacy, domesticity into resistance, and the smallest and most ordinary things into vessels for memory, desire and hope.

Download CV

Enquiries