MarlingDe Cuellar celebrity virgin

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Comment by Resident Curator on May 26, 2018 at 9:22am

Curator’s Comments:

 

I came across Celebrity Virgin randomly today, and enjoy the strong contrast of forms and text.  However, I’m uncertain if I fully understand the intended iconography, or juxtaposition of the figures.  The piece has a pleasurable pop sensibility with the combination of cultural and religious figures. The blond female on the left (who is reminiscent of Brittany Spears) is cloaked in bright blue, visually connecting her to the adjacent Madonna statue.  The pink fleshy tones in the lower half of her body are ambiguous but vaguely disturbing, as the viewer is drawn into her open legs. The flesh tones in her lower torso match the color of her face, so we’re led to believe she is nude from the waist down without anatomical clarity. But compositionally our eyes don’t rest on the uncertain pinkness, as her gaze directs us with a neon green band of light, back into the dual half of the Virgin. The block text at the bottom nicely holds the figures and further connects their status.  When I looked through your other pieces on the site I was very surprised to see this is an outlier in the grouping. While many of your figures have a graphic angularity, the softer patterns and color mediate their hard edges. I’m curious if this piece represents another body of work altogether, or if the subject demanded a different approach.  In either case, I do hope you post new work on the site. As this was posted many years ago, I am wondering if you expanded this subject.