Having shown extensively in her native Argentina and throughout Europe, Melancholy of the future is La Chola Poblete’s first presentation in Mexico and one of her largest in Latin America. She is known for her multidisciplinary work across performance, video, photography, painting, and objects, in which she navigates the intersections of colonialism, cultural identity, and historical memory to assert the importance of ancestral knowledge in the Americas and denounce gender and racial discrimination. While she pulls select visual references from previous series, such as the braid of the Andean Chola, which has become ubiquitous through much of her work, La Chola Poblete embarks on a more introspective journey in this new body of work. Addressing themes of abandonment, existential angst, and the quiet complexities of human relationships, this exhibition marks a shift towards an abstraction of sensuality.

Following several high-profile international exhibitions—most notably her inclusion in the 60th Venice Biennale–in which her artwork, identity and body were made hyper-visible, she has recently slowed down to take a more reflective approach to her life and artistic practice. The result is a series of deeply personal large-scale watercolour paintings and drawings that are abstracted self-portraiture guided by formal intuition. She explains that when working with watercolour, she starts with the stains and allows them to drive the composition. While she shapes the final form, she allows herself to be guided by the chaos of the stain. She orchestrates a balance between color, weight, and shape to conduct a choreography of gestures akin to composing a song. What emerges are bold atmospheric colors that concentrate into organic shapes and, at times, are further saturated to suggest the profile of a face or the raising of a hand. Each element is a note or word within a wider narration–some things which might be legible to a viewer and others just for herself.

In the drawings, intertwining forms and figures curve into each other, and an amalgamation of eyes, lips, pensis, breasts, and fabulously pointed heels join together in various harmonies. They are figures between man and animal, contorting into each other–in love, confrontation, and possibly even as a mirror or alter ego. In the paintings, we can find La Chola Poblete depicted sleeping in a fetal position with thoughts and worries from her daily life written below; in another, braids puncture a heart, and in a third, a knife pierces a braid, a cypher for herself and an indication of personal transformation of the many forms her braids can take.

Throughout these works, we also see colors dripping into each other and a series of bleeding roses. Though romantic in a gothic sensibility, these flower wounds suggest a sorrow spurned by events in La Chola Poblete’s personal life and the collective melancholy in anticipating endless turmoil developing globally. Oftentimes, being alive today requires an oscillation between anticipation and mourning of an unsteady world to come. As a medium, watercolour lends well to this feeling of anxiety–either surrendering to the path in which the paint drips down through the water or anguishing over a lack of control. La Chola Poblete invites us to grapple with the anticipation of the unknown and to embrace the stain as it bleeds and disintegrates some bodies and allows others to emerge–in a vibrant cocktail that strives for love.

(Text by Samantha Ozer)