Nathalie Rey

"Pig!" by Gabriela Berti Capitalist pig, fascist pig, communist pig, gluttonous pig! Nathalie Rey and Josechu Tercero’s Pig! critiques the role of current power structures and their capacity to seduce by exploring the tension between the beautiful and the unpleasant. To children, pigs are often seen as endearing figures, forming a pleasant part of their collective imagination (dolls, piggy banks, cartoons). For adults, however, they can be charged with more negative meanings, often referring to what is obscene, dirty, sexual, or excessive. Thus, in our culture, pigs are paradoxical creatures. In the exhibition proposal, this paradox is reinforced through a staging in which the animalized characters that compose it explore the dichotomies of life and death, the visual and the visceral, and desire and repulsion. These tensions contrast with the soft, pastel-colored forms of the works, opening them up to various interpretations. The grotesque dresses in pink A 14 square meters installation of a city built in plush, life-sized photos of half-animal and half-human bodies floating in the room, video-performances, and dim pink lights force viewers to constantly cross territorial power lines, which are represented by the grotesqueness of humanized pigs, the soft images of stuffed animals, and the tenderness of the pink color with a kawaii aesthetic. The journey back and forth through this landscape is, for the viewers, uncomfortable and shocking. The recurrent use of pink in different pieces is a code that signals to the viewer that she/he is entering a fictional world, but also acts as another concept within the artists' proposal. The color exaggerates the sarcasm, showing that seduction is an indispensable arm of power, while this tactic is used in the exhibition space itself. Humans and animals are a constant in Rey’s and Tercero’s broad artistic iconography, and here this relationship is approached from a caustic point of view, which refers to Animal Farm (1945) by George Orwell, Porcile (1969) by Pier Paolo Passolini, even Franklin J. Schaffner's film The Planet of the Apes (1968). The “pigs” in this exhibition adopt human practices: they sleep in beds, eat and drink sitting at the table, have romantic gestures, and succumb to the lust for power embedded in the canonical structures of human society that, as in Orwell's novel, seem to ennoble animality while reproducing the same human obscenity. Pigs can represent a reflection on the human condition, which deteriorates in its attempt to achieve more power, or maybe humanity is meditating on its own 'cerity'. We do not know… “The belly of a pig is capable of containing an entire social class”, said one of the protagonists of the film Porcile, and bourgeois morality is based on consumption and merchandise. This idea is manifested here in the use of toys, which instruct, from childhood, the alienation of consumption. The “Porn City” installation, which is part of the exhibition, is an extravagant city built with felt and stuffing, as if it was comprised of transfigured stuffed animals. This city is populated by friendly capitalist pigs (piggy banks) as inhabitants of a society that is saturated, stuffed and a victim of its own system’s values. Photos and videos of playful “human pigs”, surrounded by pastel colors and a disturbing sound, finish configuring this landscape. Pig! is an undertaking of subversive seduction, with works that are expressed in a variety of media acting as lures, which allow the audience to rethink in different semiotic registers a cosmology of human-animal assemblages that harmonize emancipatory dreams with retrograde, conservative and even fascist impulses, with which we can reverberate. Welcome to the planet of the pigs. Make yourself at home!