The sun is a hammer

Prometeogallery di Ida Pisani is pleased to present Mario Santizo first solo exhibition in Italy The sun is a hammer.

Mario Santizo has a particular and different look from the Guatemalan artists of his generation, because in his artistic practice irony, the sense of humor that often becomes satire, is always present, with which he deals with the hypocrisies and problems of Guatemalan society, and more in general, of the Latin American one.

The sun is a hammer, installation of 2016, is representative of this attitude, where the artist takes in consideration the figure of Carmen Miranda, famous Portuguese naturalized Brazilian singer and actress, who in the forties established herself internationally. Carmen Miranda is one of the figures that popularized the stereotype of the Latin American identity, as personifying the idea of the ​​tropical in Western culture. In this way, this exuberant and exotic image is intended as an homogenizing figure of a region whose cultural complexity - among other aspects - goes beyond this cliché reduction. This work aims to be a commentary on the imaginary of the exotic and the tropical, repeatedly exploited by different contemporary artists as a strategy to insert themselves into the artistic circuit. The artist's operation, therefore, is the appropriation of the image of Carmen Miranda, who he embodies in a sequence of photographic images and a sculptural bust, which in some way cancels the stereotype by constructing, on the one hand, a humorous and performative image by changing the sex of the character, and on the other, an image that cancels the chromatism of the original character, emptying it from any iconographic reference and aesthetic exaggeration.