Claudio Perna

A regular explorer of new visual languages and a pioneer in using other photographic devices such as slides and photocopies, Claudio Perna—a key figure in Venezuelan conceptualism—began using Polaroid photography in the mid-1970s, and it became an indispensable working tool for him until the middle of the following decade. The possibility of recording and immediately viewing an event, incorporating it into a book in progress, or using it to complete an idea in his head, as well as its rudimentary methods, made Polaroid very appealing to Perna. In several of his series, including the work Plátanos enmarcados (naturaleza muerta), Perna used Polaroid to record a series of ephemeral events that pointed to a revision of the concept of sculpture subjected to notions of action, situation, and temporality. The works comprise a sequence of images in which objects and characters pose in settings as if they were a still-life. In these works, Perna explores his idea of sculpture as an ephemeral fact, with no definitive location, as opposed to the volumetric object occupying public space. In Plátanos enmarcados (naturaleza muerta), Perna uses a bunch of bananas, an everyday object and an iconic emblem of Latin American identity, to reconsider his relationship with the European artistic tradition of the still life and the visual vocabulary of American pop (when looking at this work, it is almost impossible not to think of Andy Warhol’s Polaroids) from his place as an international Venezuelan artist.