Let me tell you

by Jano Cortijo & Alice Vega

In our national urban landscape there are far too many signs of what we won’t willingly make evident. Our feeble and slippery identity is a terrain that admits, even promotes, the weirdest coincidences.

As examples, we have the red-and-white Yimmi’s sign, the modest corner store baptized like the teenager that hangs out in front of it and the studious Goldie Locks that dazzles the neighborhood with her blue eyes outside a house that now bets on education just like years before it bet on CLAE.

This eagerness to take up more neurons in our visual storage for princesses and European medieval castles instead of the bloody pre-Hispanic deeds of Aia Paec has managed to make small and dark skinned Yosselin want to be Barbie on birthday number 8, whiten her complexion with Angel Face make up two tones lighter than her already light-cooper complexion at 15 and now, at 19, be determined to catch a foreigner for marriage.

With imported fantasies we have constructed a paradigm of what’s ideal and desirable, we have told ourselves a tale where looking-like is the motor to get away from what’s real and hallucinate with what’s impossible.

Precisely fantasizing about our blush inducing references, Jorge Gonzales San Miguel has achieved a reunion that lives up to that of Saint Martin de Porres. This explosive meeting of images gives us impossible scenes which subvert the idyllic allegories that adorn schools and kindergartens: Cinderella’s rosy blush is now brown; Snow White no longer honors her name or last name and Sleeping Beauty would rather keep sleeping than be awakened by a dark prince.

A statement as simple and imposing as the ineffable dish of spaghetti with papa a la huancaína that nobody thought of putting together and is now almost essential in our national diet.

text for the exhibition “Let me tell you” by Jorge Gonzales San Miguel Lima, 2004